On Tuesday, April 2, 2002, at 09:29 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
At first I thought it was due to bad hardware, or perhapsbroken/incompatible sound drivers; but one day, I got an idea and ran thefollowing program:
It is bad hardware. The kernel puts the CPU into low-power mode when idle (see another poster's description of no-hlt). The sound hardware on your machine is not electrically isolated enough, so you can hear these state transitions. This is fairly common.
If the distortion is happening post-amp (doubtful), you can turn up the volume and use an external attenuater to soften it to sane levels.
Alternatively, move the DAC outside of your computer case. Relatively good USB audio devices are available for around $140 (ThinkGeek happily sold me one). Optical, Digital output to an external amp will sound good, too.
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