Calling anyone who uses KDE with arts sound enabled - the sound effects associated with minimising, changing desktops, etc.:

Sound lags the event, say new window appearing, by one second with KDE. Is this supposed to happen - so as I know if I should try to put it right?

You can try to bypass arts and use an external player, like mpg123, play (sox), mplayer or whatever. The relevant options are in kcontrol. If that works ok then it's just arts acting up, as it usually does.

Thanks i92guboj. If I try sox using oss emulation with television there is a delay but the television is still just acceptable to watch/listen to. If do the same with sox but alsa then the delay is unacceptable, but probably not one second - though I'm not certain.

Upshot is I don't know if the thing has failed your test or not. I've turned arts off and do not feel the loss, as yet.

So there's a delay still.

Can you open htop, top or something similar and see if there's anything eating your cpu time? What kind of hardware are we speaking of?

Top says load average sort of 1.5%, do not think there is anything untoward, but not a pundit. No process uses more than 1%.

Twin core AMD 64, 4G RAM.

Then, if it happens the same without arts the problem must be in alsa. Maybe your sound chip is too new or not too well supported. Your hardware should be able to play anything without any noticeable delay. You can always try to update to the latest and greatest kernel version and see if that helps. Also, look in the dmesg output just in case the sound driver is spitting any useful info or error.

What I meant was, with arts producing sounds of breaking glass etc, for desktop events there was a 1 second (literally - it's an eternity) delay. As it happens I found out how to switch off arts after making this post and switched it off. So no desktop sound effects. The television sound latency, the only thing I could think of to do as a basis for, as you suggest, comparison, is very much shorter.

Went to elaborate lenths to get rid of tv latency, eventually using CD-cable thing from capture card to sound card. I thought it was perfectly natural to have bad sound latency with tv and alsa.

Having big trouble with mythtv at the moment, sound far to fast and high pitched, and video keeps ?skipping. Perhaps related to latency problem, if you say it is a problem.

I'll try latest kernel, newer than 26. Sound card is supposed to be fully supported except for ?HDMI. Nothing I can spot in dmesg. Thanks.