KDE Neon and sound

[Duncan]

Dennis Heuer posted on Mon, 25 Apr 2022 21:31:18 +0200 as excerpted:

> I use KDE Neon on a BioStar A68N-5600E and the soundboxes always bang
> between youtube videos (not exclusively). The problem occurs immediately
> after sound was virtually off. I found an unrelated option in the energy
> management section of the KDE System Manager. When I turned it on and
> off and then confirmed, the sound problem was gone. However, beginning
> yesterday, the trick ain't work anymore.
> 
> I think it's an initialization problem. Can I somehow tinker this
> manually? I guess, the energy management is somewhat too quick in
> decision taking!?

The audio "pop" is a somewhat common hardware problem not really directly 
related to KDE.  There are a few workarounds/fixes, depending on how 
technical you are.  The most "correct" but also most technical is to add 
your sound device to a kernel device exceptions list so it handles the 
device differently.  (The kernel lists go by a different name I can't 
remember ATM, but the kernel maintains many such lists for different 
devices and purposes as so many devices don't quite match the standards 
they claim, I see commits adding this or that device to some such list all 
the time as I follow kernel development to some degree.  Of course on MS 
the manufacturer normally ships the drivers with the hardware and they 
just ship the workaround in the driver so the MS user never knows the 
difference.)

The easiest and probably what you were effectively doing with the energy 
management trick is to either turn off power management for that device so 
it stays on (doesn't suspend/turn-off), or at least, so it waits a 
significant idle time before turning off, tho of course that does affect 
power usage, which is more of a problem on a laptop/handheld than a 
desktop/workstation.

Unfortunately I can't go into specifics as I'm on a desktop system and 
actually don't have most of kde's power-management components installed 
(I'm on gentoo so can turn more of it off at build time), but at least you 
know what the problem is now, and in general where to go to turn it off.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman