Leap 42.2 gruntiing noises on sound - kde phonon

I'm not sure if this is a general problem or just mine. The grunt noise is similar to one that has often happened when a sound system come up during boot only this time it happens when ever a sound plays. grunt - good sound - another grunt when it ends. Also sometimes grunts for no apparent reason or when a web page loads. I "leaped" from 12.3 and had no sound problems at all with that with exactly the same gear.

There are 3 sound "cards" on my system. On the video card, on the motherboard and a soundblaster titanium. Install picked the one on the motherboard. I had a bit of a problem with kde remaining on the titanium so killed the other 2 via yast. I hadn't used the system for long enough to determine if doing that caused a problem.

I'd be grateful for any ideas on a fix or even just knowing if leap's kde just does this.

John
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When browsing and hear other (eg grunt) noises often find problem is auto-started audio/videos on web pages.



Self found helpful reading this article
URL http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux...leshooting.htm


for KDE perhaps this one:
URL https://userbase.kde.org/Sound_Problems


Check log files for Warnings or Errors.



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Thanks. Sadly those are mostly concerned with no sound and there are no errors in the logs.

I've found out a little more about the problem. KDE has a speaker test feature to identify the left and right channel. 2 buttons left and right. If I open it and click left I get grunt then good sound. If I then click right, just good sound. If I then click left just good sound. That can be repeated over and over and no grunts. Leave it for a while and start again and the grunt crops up again. Close and open this window and the initial grunt crops up again - sort of oh well don't need sound now.

Something some where is dropping sound on a timed basis and being very noisy getting it back again. It also seems to anticipate that sound may be needed so brings it up again - that explains the odd grunts sometime when web pages are loaded or for no apparent reason.

Or of course something else is causing it to behave like this.

John
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It looks like the sound service being dropped when it's not needed is normal operation. So my problem is just the noises that even dropping out causes.

What it seems to boil down to is that using an optical output from a card is causing it. KDE only offers me an iec985 option. Some other stuff at a lower level (YAST sound set up) offers 2 aux volume controls, one for iec985 and one for digital. The iec one doesn't do anything, the digital one works as expected. No extra noises at this level. The actual sound when it plays is always fine so the problem is the grunts at the start and when the sound service drops out.

One other possible culprit is a comment in the pulse config file. Maybe not a good idea to load static lib's here so commented out and later done by udev-detect. I've traced back the card as far as I can, pci and up. It does seem to be detected correctly and the correct driver is loaded. Past this comes a mass of directories. The card is a creative titanium xfi hd.

Driving from the console, playing wav's etc also has the problem apart from one which spec's front speakers using speaker-test. Sort of suggests that the problem is past alsa.

I booted the machine up with a Knoppix iso, lxde desktop. No sounds from desktop apps until I loaded alsa tools. Then all was ok. It appears to use alsa to get to the desktop. The desktop mixer shows the 2 aux volume controls, digital and iec985. That one didn't do anything, the digital one did.

Back to running leap. Someone suggested adding tsched=0. Didn't make any difference.

John
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