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Red_Fir

Member

Registered: 2023-10-01

Posts: 17  

[SOLVED] Machine specific sound issue

I have Devuan 6 runit installed on a new (to me!) bone stock Dell 5820, 32 GB ram, with pulse audio the sound was choppy,
I installed pipewire, and ... the sound was choppy.
Its choppy on line out, speakers, chassis speakers, and bluetooth headphones!
The headphones are the important ones because its in a crowded room.

I desperation I loaded a copy of ShaniOS (an immutable Arch distro) and it does the same.
Ditto with a Puppy linux stick.
Oogling the Google this appears to be a common problem with many users reporting multiple factory sound card swaps without changing behavior.

I have an ancient Sound Blaster Pro (90's era) I could install?  Would it even effect the bluetooth operation?

Cognoscenti; shower your wisdom on me and bless me with the crooning lullabies entombed in my "music" directory!

steve_v

Member

Registered: 2018-01-11

Posts: 687  

Re: [SOLVED] Machine specific sound issue

Dell 5820

Doesn't really tell anyone anything... Unless you expect them to go digging through dell's specifications. What sound chipset and codec does it have? Onboard or expansion card? Which driver is in use?

with pulse audio the sound was choppy, I installed pipewire, and ... the sound was choppy.

Try it with neither - i.e. aplay to bare ALSA with no sound server running (ideally a direct hw:<whatever> PCM). That'll rule out most software shenanigans.

I have an ancient Sound Blaster Pro (90's era) I could install?

SBPro was 16bit ISA, and I highly doubt you have a compatible expansion slot.

Would it even effect the bluetooth operation?

The audio hardware in the PC generally isn't involved at all with bluetooth devices, it's the endpoint that does all the stream decoding and D/A conversion. So no, even if bluetooth existed when the SBPro was released, which it didn't.

---

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. Four times is Official GNOME Policy.

delgado

Member

Registered: 2022-07-14

Posts: 289  

Re: [SOLVED] Machine specific sound issue

The audio hardware in the PC generally isn't involved at all with bluetooth devices

So if both outputs sound equally crappy, it souldn't be the problem of a specific output device.

In contrary to the first sentence (but anyway):
USB-audio-sticks are cheap and the linux-kernel has a universal driver buiild in. Can be worth a try.

Dell offers Ubuntu for some notebooks; maybe for testing purposes ... .

kapqa

Member

Registered: 2019-01-02

Posts: 662  

Re: [SOLVED] Machine specific sound issue

if you want the computer to host your music library and playback on the same ,
suggest to rid the linux distro of pulseaudio - pipewire since in my experiennce it sijmply siounds better without.
had often times issues with crappy sound on linux , after removing pulseaudio and setting up alsa-only, the issue was greatly relieved.

there may be better options, but on linux my experience is limited so far;

getting rid of pulseaudio - pipewire made me sort of a happy linux user.

on a dell optiplex 960 running devuan 5 can use audio with alsa-only pretty well, although the speakers are minicky.

if you want to test some other route, you could try "volumio" for playback on a small sbc, like raspberry (tested on raspberr 1 and 2) - it functions great and is free with limited set of features; but you still need to hook-up. loudspeakers to it, and the options on raspberry are bit limited.

for transforming the pc to a alsa-only box, there are quite a number of topics on this forum;

specifically for devuan 6, you could try this approach and see if it functions for you (you mentioned devuan 6 "runit")
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=63654#p63654

happy playback!

Red_Fir

Member

Registered: 2023-10-01

Posts: 17  

Re: [SOLVED] Machine specific sound issue

Well it turned out to be simpler than I feared,
In a fit of pique I disabled the (onboard, and only) sound card in the Bios and Voilà! the OS picked it up and pipewire plays excellently on all outputs.

Its a bizarre old world, don't ask me why.
Mine is just to mindlessly mash buttons hoping for an epiphany