by I have recently purchased a Turtle Beach "Santa Cruz" sound card for my
Debian-based MP3 jukebox (see <http://www.giantdisc.com/> for software
details). It has great sound, but there is one very annoying problem I
haven't been able to solve.
After playing MP3's with mpg123 for around 2-2.5 hours, the sound
becomes quite distorted with a high-pitched whine. I can also sometimes
cause this by rapidly starting and stopping mpg123 a few dozen times.
As far as I can tell the problem always happens when an MP3 first starts
playing, never partway into the song. When the problem occurs,
unloading and reloading the cs46xx driver fixes it for another 2-2.5
hours.
I've found a few references on Google to similar problems with IBM
Thinkpads, but this is a Dell Optiplex GXa desktop machine (233 MHz
Pentium, 64 MB, 40 GB). DMA and IDE interrupt unmasking are enabled for
the hard drive. I have tried:
o Enabling and disabling APM in BIOS and on kernel command line.
o Moving the card to a different slot.
o Enabling and disabling the onboard cs4232 in BIOS (driver is not
loaded in either case).
o Replacing the card.
I've been running a custom 2.2.20 kernel, which has been working
perfectly fine with the on-board sound. Just now upgraded it to
Debian's 2.4.18-686 to see if that helps. There seem to be some
differences between the 2.2 and 2.4 versions of the driver, but I have
not studied them in depth.
If anyone else has seen a problem like this I'd like to hear from you.
I would really like to get this card working as it has much better sound
than the on-board chip.
Thanks.
--
-| Bob Hauck
-| To Whom You Are Speaking
-| http://www.haucks.org/