Bug#756150: pulseaudio: High pitched whine through headphones when no audio is playing

[Felipe Sateler]

Control: tags -1 moreinfo

On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 3:00 PM, Harlan Lieberman-Berg
<H.LiebermanBerg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Package: pulseaudio
> Version: 5.0-2
> Severity: normal
>
> Dear Maintainer,
>
> I've recently noticed a high-pitched whine playing through the headphones,
> specifically when no audio is playing - or, perhaps, when nothing is accessing
> pulseaudio.  Having any sound application open but playing no sound (mplayer
> paused, for example, or flash running with the sound muted) silences this
> whine.  Additionally, having the Gnome sound control panel open to see what
> applications are accessing pulseaudio also prevents the sound from occuring.
>
> If any sound is player, the sound will instantly vanish, only to return within
> about ten seconds of the next time no audio is playing.

That sounds like a problem with alsa, that it doesn't suspend the
device properly: pulseaudio suspends the device when it is no longer
using it.

You can test this hipothesis by disabling the module suspend-on-idle.
You can do that by commenting the relevant line in
/etc/pulse/default.pa and restarting pulseaudio:

pulseaudio -k ; pulseaudio --start

Without the modifications to default.pa, could you please post the
output of "pactl list"?

Also without modification, if you could get a full log it would be great too:

pulseaudio -k; pulseaudio -vvvv --log-time --log-target=file:pa.log


-- 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler