[lug] Irritating sound problem

[D. Stimits]

David Trowbridge wrote:
> 
> Now that I've got linux installed on my new box I wasted no time getting
> sound working. I have a new problem however. I've got a Turtle Beach Santa
> Cruz card, which uses the Crystal Clear SoundFusion driver (cs46xx). Every
> time I play a sound (music in particular) I get a 'beating' noise
> interfering with it. Is this a feature of the driver?
> 
> Anybody dealt with this dsp before? If so, I could really use some help.
> 
> Thanks,
> -David
> 
> -------------------
> David Trowbridge
> jupiter at flatirons.org
> http://jupiter.babylonia.flatirons.org
> 
> "Base 8 is just like base 10 really...if you're missing two fingers"
>         -Tom Lehrer
> 

I haven't dealt with that particular driver, but it is something of a
recurring theme for some sound drivers. One cause is the sharing of irq
with some other device that is constantly running an irq, especially the
video card, sometimes a serial port (failure of sound while running a
modem for example). Another case I've heard about a lot is simply
insufficient buffer space being allocated for the speed of hard drive
read (along with everything eating up hard drive reads). Probably I'd
check first if the irq is being shared, and if so, whether you can
change the irq (sometimes this can be accomplished at the software
level, sometimes a card needs to be moved to a different slot). The
earlier 2.4.x kernels seem to be more sensitive to this than the later
2.4.x kernels, so if you use 2.4.x, you might try the most recent
2.4.5-ac series (Alan Cox patched), or 2.4.6-pre series. The ac patches
are at:
ftp://zeus.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/

If none of that works, you will want to find out who the maintainer is
for the particular driver and ask there too.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com