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Date:      Tue, 13 Apr 2004 16:45:32 -0500
From:      Sean Welch <Sean_Welch@alum.wofford.org>
To:        freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org
Subject:   Inspiron 8000 running 5.2.1 sound issues
Message-ID:  <20040413214532.GA961@NitroPhys.welchsmnet.net>

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I have written about this before asking for help but nothing I have
tried up to this point has worked.

I'm running straight 5.2.1-RELEASE code and no matter what I modify
in the code I get behavior very similar to what I saw in
5.2-RELEASE.  At that time someone was circulating a patch that
fixed it for me.  The symptoms were (and are) periodic freezing of
the sound for fractions of a second causing a "blurring" of the
sound.  Something like the audio you hear in the Matrix when Neo has
been given a "tracer" and is being overcome by the mirror like
surface right before he wakes up for the first time.  Only on a much
shorter time scale.

A similar effect can be heard when audio is playing on a laptop and
the battery is removed (obviously have the laptop plugged in before
doing this!).  Everything freezes and the sound is distorted and
repeated for a bit.

I tried the patch I had used successfully under 5.2-RELEASE and it
did nothing to alleviate the issue.  Someone else suggested a much
more comprehensive patch and I got precisely the same result.
Finally today I couldn't take it anymore and installed the source
from 5.2-RELEASE and compiled a new snd_pcm.ko from that with the
patch that had worked for me with that code -- same result!

Then I remembered similar issues with a 4.x release a while back
(4.6 maybe?) that I tracked down to the charging cycle of the
batteries.  Everything was fine with only one battery but I normally
run two.  So I removed one battery.  Much better but still some
anomalies.  I removed the other one and the sound was PERFECT.

Now this is *really* annoying.  I've found a way around the issue
but it requires me to lose the batteries.  So much for crisp
listening away from the wall socket...

Up until 5.2.1 I've had to replace the dsdt -- I've not been doing
that with this release but figuring it had something to do with acpi
I replaced it.  No difference.  I'm now back to running the
snd_pcm.ko module that shipped with 5.2.1 because it is perfect with
no batteries and has the same issues as the patched versions with
batteries.

Help?  Any clues I might be able to follow up on?

Sean



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