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Red_Fir

Member

Registered: 2023-10-01

Posts: 16  

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: 683  

Re: 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.

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