Intel High Definition Audio. Sound totally sucks!!!

[raid517]

Hi I have an High Definition Audio chip on my laptop - which gives pretty decent sound for a laptop. (It uses Harman Kardon Speakers too which help somewhat).

In any case I have found that in Gentoo my sound totally sucks. It's really rattly, rasping and very crackly and broken up.

The exact same chip works really well on this same system with Debian - so it isn't anything to do with compatibility in Linux.

I know sound on most laptops isn't great - but mine is pretty OK, so it's not just a case of onboard sound not being very good - as the driver is clearly malfunctioning and the sound it is producing isn't normal at all.

Can anyone possible suggest a way I might be able to resolve this?

Thanks!

[dkeav]

try a kernel upgrade

[raid517]

Yeah I tried that. I went from linux-2.6.18-gentoo-r4 to linux-2.6.18-gentoo-r6, but it made no difference.

[leonpmu]

Realtek have drivers on their website that work, although on mine I am having headaches to get the user to start artsd, under root it works brilliantly... go figure

[dkeav]

same kernel, different patch set, likely the driver module have not changed any

[XiaoKJ]

alsa version? I used 1.0.13 and it hangs. 1.0.12 works fine here.

Somewhere in the upgrade caused the problem for me.

[retsaw]

Have you checked your mixer levels? Having PCM set >75% causes distortion with some soundcards.