37

I just upgraded to 18.04, and I noticed that the sound from my headphones, whether plugged into front or back port, was very crackling and slow/delayed. This issue didn't exist on 17.04/10. It also doesn't affect audio coming from HDMI via Radeon 560 GPU, just the headphone/onboard audio. The relevant device is: 

00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H HD Audio (rev 31)

I tried a bunch of fixes for pulseaudio I found googling, including this one and this one. Neither of which helped.

I have found something that at least makes it listenable - changing "default-fragment-size-msec" from 25 to 5 in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf. It makes it much much better, but still a little crackly from time to time.

I've googled for 30 min or more now, and not finding anything else that seems recent and relevant, so wondering if I should maybe open a bug, or if there's something I'm overlooking here.

Pablo Bianchi
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jwinterm
  • 481

6 Answers6

53

I had the same problem. It seems related to speech-dispatcher (some text-to-speech utility).
try :

killall speech-dispatcher

If the sound comes back to normal you can remove it completely (if you don't need it) with :

sudo apt-get remove speech-dispatcher
Bithur
  • 631
  • 5
  • 3
32

I had the same issue and killing pulseaudio fixed it for me. I'm not sure why it would get into a bad state, but restarting pulseaudio might be something to try.

Try

killall pulseaudio
Pablo Bianchi
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Tommy
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26

Press Ctrl+Alt+T to go to a terminal and use your favourite editor to edit the file

nano /etc/pulse/default.pa

then find a line containing:

load-module module-udev-detect

modify this to become:

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

save and exit. Restart your computer or run:

pulseaudio -k

and you're all set!

Gert Sønderby
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H360
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3

I ran into the same issue (crackling sound) today on Ubuntu 18.10 on my Intel NUC Canyon Hades. 

killall pulseaudio

only fixed it temporarily for some reason. After a few minutes the problem was back again.

What ultimately did the trick was the answer posted by Fabby in combination with the comment by statson to enter 

pulseaudio -k
Claire
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Roman Kaufmann
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0

No matter what I did, I didn't get it to work with Pulseaudio (I'm using a Focusrite Scarlett USB Audio Interface)

I followed the steps from this link and use PipeWire - instantly everything works like a charm!

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-pipewire-on-ubuntu-linux

Sir hennihau
  • 204
-3

If you have Firefox or Chrome open when the sound starts distorting. Shut them browsers down and test the sound again. If it has stopped, then you need to use a different web browser. I installed Vivaldi yesterday and I haven't had a problem since. There are many browsers to choose from.

Magnus Colt
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