Maestro sound card, scratching

[Hugo van der Merwe <hugo@mailroom.com>]

Hello,

Should I CC this to debian-user? I'd guess this sound card is probably not
Laptop-only...

I have an ESS Maestro 2, with which I am having a small problem: after
playing music for a while, the left channel starts scratching. This is
also sometimes triggered by a small processing task, e.g. starting X... or
sometimes something as trivial as `ps ax` stopping the music for a couple
of seconds and then resuming tends to stop the scratching.

I am wondering if it is the hardware, or possibly the driver? I get the
idea that as soon as the audio device is freed and "reallocated" (I'm
running esd -as 2, which frees the audio device after 2 seconds of
inactivity, allowing other users to use it) the scratching goes away, but
that could be just coincidence. I'll experiment some more with how to get
the scratching to stop, but it is rather difficult, as there is no quick
way to get it to scratch in the first place.

Any ideas? I'm thinking of taking the laptop back to the manufacturer so
that they can check/replace the sound card, I just want to make sure that
there is a good chance it is actually the hardware.

Thanks,
Hugo van der Merwe