[mythtv-users] Re:Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound distortion with ALSA

[Babak Masalehdan]

The Iraqi Information Minister today denied that on Friday 27 June 2003 00:52, 
Mark Chou wrote:
> I had a variation of the problem you're describing, TB Santa Cruz w/
> alsa 9.0rc8.  Occasionally for no apparent reason, the audio shifts to
> what I describe "higher frequency harmonics."  There is suddenly high
> pitched noise/buzz that accompanies the audio, as if there was a "loose
> screw" on top of a sub woofer.
>
> I don't know what I did, but it no longer happens as much as it used to.
>   In fact, I haven't noticed it in a while.  Maybe it was a later
> version of mythtv cvs, I don't know.  All I know is that it hasn't
> happened for me in the last 3 wks or so.

This is a known problem with the Cirrus cs4630 DSP, and sorry to say it will 
never be fixed.  I ran into this myself a while back on my primary computer, 
and I dug up this message on LKML: 
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linux-kernel/2001-16/0289.html
I then emailed the writer, cirrus engineer Tom Woller, about it about a year 
ago to see if they had figured it out, and this was his reply to me:

"Woller, Thomas" <twoller at crystal.cirrus.com>
> sorry. no fix for it. :(  since the only DSP engineer that could
> have fixed the problem is no longer here, i don't think that
> it'll ever get fixed.  
> tom

It stopped happening for me after a while (I have no idea why), and I'm now 
using nforce2 audio.  The only workaround was to manually unload and reload 
the kernel module, which reset it, but it was just as likely to go scratchy 
again after you did that.

Babak