Sound issues under 11.04-12.04, various hardward
 

Hey folks. I've been trying on other forums to get help for, oh, 6 months, to no avail. My sound is getting unusable, there are now three distinct problems - some of which have followed me across fresh installs and OS upgrades and hardware replacement.... Perhaps someone has some ideas?

I've given a quick look at the guides in this thread, if you think I need to run through them to give you more info, say the word and I'll run them... But perhaps something will sound familiar enough to you.

My system started as 10.04 and has followed the routine upgrades to 12.04. The system was built for this, a intel i3 with a Zotac H67ITX-C-E (H67 chipset). I've done several fresh installs, and always have the same issue:

After some indeterminate amount of time/interaction/sounds, I'll find the LFE (the .1 from my 5.1) channel no longer playing. Going into the sound controls and selecting most anything (even a non- bass channel system like 4.0) will instantly find the sub-woofer working again. As you can imagine, the ultimate home theater isn't that great when I have to get up and tweak the settings twice a night.

Anyway, now on the fresh 12.04 install, I'm also getting very high frequency noise, like when WINE used to have ALSA issues on my other desktop. I could believe it to be bit shifting on the outputs - least significant bits making a high frequency output on the highest volumes - but it could be something else entirely.

This kinda sneaks in, and sometimes muting and unmuting fixes it. If not, even running alsamixer won't fix it. Interestingly, switching to 4.0 (which gives me 4.1 sound) does fix it, going back to 5.1 restores everything.

Does anyone have any suggestions? This issue has been going on for years, but as it was only dropping base, I didn't care. Now that it's endangering my speakers and my relationships, I need to do something. It seems to happen after a couple hours of listening to music.

--> If this has been covered and I missed it, please point me to where I can read up on it. Thank you.

THANKS!!!
-Abe.
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System Summary:
Ubuntu 12.04 (clean install, issues present before)
Intel i3 2600t
Zotac H67ITX-C-E (H67 chipset, 2nd motherboard, same symptoms)
5.1 sound hooked up through analog outs

The closest I could find was <link removed> about Z68 boards, but it's not really clipping per se.

Post output of

WOW! After looking for help on this for years.....

http://askubuntu.com/questions/53802...rences-problem


SO AMAZING! We'll see if it lasts, but it looks like the woofer issue is solved.

I have no idea if the high pitched static thing will go away, but I believe the problems to be unrelated (logically, and historically, they are unrelated). So I'm still hoping to find some solution to that!
-Abe.