Ubuntu

Crack when removing earphones

Asked by Vincent KUBICKI

I just installed Ubuntu 13.10 on my Asus n76vz laptop. When I remove earphones, I hear a crack sound coming from the laptop speakers which is quite loud. If I mute the sound, the crack is audible, but at a lower level.

Is there a simple way to diagnose and solve this problem ? The sound seems to be fully functional aside from that.

(I am a bit new to problem reporting, I first posted this question on askubuntu, but I guess that launchpad is more apropriate)

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Vincent KUBICKI
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Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131) said : 		#1

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/AlsaInfo

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Vincent KUBICKI (vincent-kubicki) said : 		#2

The corresponding information has been uploaded there: http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=3eab600f0f37af235fd9e9c81a0678ec0e08460f .

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Thomas Krüger (thkrueger) said : 		#3

Such sounds are not related to any software (like the OS), they are a hardware problem. Most likely you have an electrical potencial between the speaker, the headphones and the mainboard. When the speakers are reconnected the potencial is causing the sound. In most cases this is causes by bad grounding, a general problem with laptops.
If the sound is too annoying for you, you can try to ground the laptop on one of the outer metal parts of a connector. The outside of the LAN port or the screws of a display connector are good points. Also touching this parts while disconnecting the headphones can reduce the sound.

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Vincent KUBICKI (vincent-kubicki) said : 		#4

There was no such sound using Windows 7 on the same machine. One reply at Askubuntu suggested a similar mechanism, and that Windows used a trick to reduce the sound. I wondered if such fix existed on Ubuntu.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#5

If you use other distributions (not based on Ubuntu or Debian) does it happen there too (Pupp or OpenSUSE are 2 suggestions)

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Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131) said : 		#6

Perhaps this commit is relevant:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/6fc16e58adf50c0f1e4478538983fb5ff6f453d4

Try it out:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/UpgradingAlsa/DKMS

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Vincent KUBICKI (vincent-kubicki) said : 		#7

I do not know when that happened, but I just noticed that the cracking sounds have disappeared. I am not sure if it is due to a kernel update though as I also installed several things lately, among which tlp and bumblebee for example.