MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Jul 20th, '17, 22:05

I'm having a strange issue with my audio playback after my system has been up for a while.
I've noticed that in both vlc and playing video's on youtube (or other videos in browser) that after some time my audio gets delayed.
In vlc I can adjust it by using the audio delay option, but I kepe having to increase the time, so that's not a working solution.
When watching video's the delay gets especially noticable when watching somebody speak and their lips moving seconds before you actualy hear the words.

After my system has been running for a bit longer the sound sometimes also gets distorted and starts hitching and crackling with even a little bit of echo (hard to describe the effect), but it's really annoying.

When I try to change the volume (with mouse scrollwheel on sound icon in taskbar) the sound appears to have no delay or distortion though.

Edit:
After a reboot it usually works for a bit and then it comes back after a while.

Before I was unable to install MGA5 due to issues with nvme, so I had Windows 10 installed, and I never had issues here, so it shouldn't be a hardware issue.

Information about my system:
Motherboard: Asus Z170I Pro Gaming (mITX)
Proc: i5-6600
Mem: Kingston Hyper-X Savage 16GB DDR4 2133MHz
GPU: Asus STRIX-GTX950-DC2-2GD5-GAMING (Nvidia GeForce GTX 950)
SSD: Samsung 950 Pro 256GB M2 NVME
HDD: WD Blue 1TB
Connected to LG 47LB670V television over HDMI (on GTX 950)
All mageia updates installed
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby wintpe » Jul 21st, '17, 16:59

my amazon fire stick does this as well. but i put that down to it having a 5hts processor.

that's clearly not the case on your hw, so id be looking to see whats the bottleneck.

are you running a hardwired network or wifi.

if its wifi are you sharing it.

whats possibly happening in the background is the video is dropping frames because of a limitation in delivering all the info, and thats causing it to go out of sync.

often youtube itself can get overwhelmed and and be the cause of the bottleneck.

regards peter
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Jul 21st, '17, 18:03

Thank you for your reply.

My network is wired, but seeing as it's also happening with vlc and local storage videos, the network shouldn't be the issue.

However i've been testing some more and I noticed I forgot to mention I use Chrome as the default browser.
I've been testing with Firefox when the issue occurs and there seems to be no lagging audio in Firefox when I do have lagging audio in Chrome.
I'll need to test some more however because I've not had Firefox running for a longer time, where Chrome usually is running for a bit longer before the issue occurs.
This still doesn't explain the issue in VLC though, and the issue in Chrome doesn't go away after closing and restarting it. The only thing that fixes it in both VLC and Chome seems to be rebooting the entire machine.

I did also find another topic which seems to describe my issue quite closely, although I don't see a solution at first glance and I'm hesitant to try the changes seeing as they are related to ArchLinux, not Mageia.
The topic is: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=116172
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby doktor5000 » Jul 22nd, '17, 12:35

Well, what soundcard or chip do you use, and do you have the same log entries as mentioned in that thread? Like this:
hda-intel: IRQ timing workaround is activated for card #1. Suggest a bigger bdl_pos_adj.


And the solution there was just changing a pulseaudio scheduler option, that is not specific to Arch and you can do the same for Mageia.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Jul 22nd, '17, 12:50

I'll have a look tonight.
Wouldn't it be strange that it's intel hda though? Seeing as it's a Nvidia Graphics card's HDMI port that's used?
I'll at least try to change the pulseaudio option, to see if it helps.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Jul 22nd, '17, 17:19

Output of lspci | grep udio:
Code: Select all
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H HD Audio (rev 31)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation Device 0fba (rev a1)


In System Settings > Audio and Video the Preferred Audio Playback Device is HDA NVidia Digital Stereo (HDMI 2)
This is applied to all other audio playback categories.

When I goto Mageia Control Center -> Hardware -> Sound configuration it says:
Code: Select all
NVIDIA Corporation|Device 0fba
Your card uses the "snd_hda_intel" driver

PulseAudio is Enabled and Glitch-Free mode is used.

So, from what I read of lspci (and what I know) I have 2 audio devices, my integrated audio device on the motherboard, which is an Intel HD audio device and the HDMI HD audio on my GeForce card.
The GeForce card's HDMI audio is preferred, so I'd think it's not using the Intel HDA.
But then I don't understand the message "Your card uses the "snd_hda_intel" driver.
Or is the Intel driver also used for the NVidia HDMI audio?

I changed the /etc/pulse/default.pa line to include tsched=0 as suggested and did a reboot, now I'll go back to testing.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Jul 23rd, '17, 01:11

Did some more testing, but unfortunately the problem still remains.

It's especially noticeable in vlc when I start and close vlc by starting a video.
Starting a video makes it so that vlc and the video itself is already running, but the sound only starts a second or so later.
Closing vlc closes the window instantly, but the sound keeps going for a second or so.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby doktor5000 » Jul 23rd, '17, 09:36

RagingRaven wrote:But then I don't understand the message "Your card uses the "snd_hda_intel" driver.
Or is the Intel driver also used for the NVidia HDMI audio?

Yes, nearly all of the HDA chipsets are driven by that intel module.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Jul 23rd, '17, 15:49

Ah ok, well that explains that than.
I can't seem to find a logical explanation so far.
It only seems to get stranger.

First it seemed like I could only get rid of the delay in vlc by rebooting, but yesterday, before I went to sleep I left my rig running with the problem still around in vlc.
This morning I started a video in vlc and there was no delay (after a while it was back though and restarting vlc doesn't help)

So for some reason restarting vlc doesn't work.
Rebooting my computer does work (for a while).
Waiting for an extended period somehow also seems to work (for a while).

This makes no sense to me whatsoever.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Jul 31st, '17, 10:01

Any ideas? anything I could try? I'd really like to keep using mageia, but seeing as I use my rig mostly for viewing video's (local/youtube) this issue is big enough to switch back to Windows if I can't find a solution.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby wintpe » Jul 31st, '17, 10:25

does your PC have an external audio connection, analog, or headphones.

see if its also happening when you use that interface.

regards peter
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Jul 31st, '17, 13:31

It does, I will give it a try.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Aug 2nd, '17, 13:16

Gave it a try yesterday and so far it seems like it doesn't happen when using the analog output.
Obviously that's not how I'd like my speakers to be connected, as I'd have to replug my speakers each time I want to use my console or watch tv from my Set-top box, but it migh narrow down the issue.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby doktor5000 » Aug 2nd, '17, 16:10

You can try to disable the idle module, or disable the power management for the soundcard. See e.g. the answers and explanation at https://askubuntu.com/questions/218444/ ... ts-delayed
Maybe also see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pu ... turned_off
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Aug 4th, '17, 09:37

I'll have a look at those and see if they provide a solution. Thanks.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby jeffrobins » Aug 27th, '17, 21:16

I'm having similar problems (distortion and pausing***, not skipping) with Amarok and VLC. I don't have the problem with Firefox. If I'm watching video and the video pauses, then the audio pauses too. If I'm listening to an MP3 in Firefox, then no pausing or distortion. mpg123 and mpg321 don't have any pausing or distortion either. I'm using the analog output from my sound-card.

***The audio pauses for less than a second to 2 seconds and then continues again, but from the exact same place it stopped, no skipping.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Aug 28th, '17, 09:11

I've been pretty busy the last month, so I haven't had time to try the solutions yet.
I did however notice that the issue does infact also happen with my analog audio connection, even though at first it seemed like it didn't happen.

Strangely though it seems to take way way longer for it to appear when using my analog connection.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby jeffrobins » Aug 30th, '17, 05:01

I did the following and now my sound is mostly okay. I still get al pause when Firefox does something processor intensive (apparently hit submit in these forums), but no distortion. I'll try reverting them slowly, when I have more time.
1) In "/etc/pulse/default.pa" commented out:
a) "load-module module-role-cork" - made some difference
b) "load-module module-suspend-on-idle" - made the most difference
2) Turned off the power save for my sound card
a) "echo N | tee /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save_controller" - didn't seem to do much
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby jeffrobins » Aug 30th, '17, 05:36

Okay. So I listened longer and the pausing still happens, even when Firefox is idle. I'm not hearing any distortion though.
I ran ksysgaurd and I couldn't see any correlation with CPU, IO read or write, etc. My desktop was mostly idle on all 4 processors and the audio was still pausing.
I increased the CPU and I/O priority of Amarok, but no benefits were seen.

I kept Amarok playing and started another song with mpg123. Amarok pauses, but mopg123 does not. mpg123 keeps playing even while Amarok is having one of its glitches.
The volume mixer tells me that mpg123 uses the ALSA plugin. Maybe that's the difference?
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby jiml8 » Aug 30th, '17, 09:11

All this makes me wonder if you perhaps have a thermal issue with your hardware. Perhaps the sound chip is overheating?
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby RagingRaven » Aug 30th, '17, 09:31

Very unlikely, it never happened when I was using Windows. If it were a thermal issue, it would have also happened when using Windows.
Secondly it's a pretty new machine with non-stock fans. Seeings as it's still pretty new, there's also no issue with too much dust collection.
Lastly if it were the audio chip overheating, it wouldn't happen on both internal as well as hdmi audio, seeing as internal audio is an audio chip on the motherboard and hdmi audio is done by the geforce graphics card.
I'm about 99% certain it's not a hardware issue, but either a driver or software issue. Reason for this is that, as I mentioned, when I was using Windows 10 the system was working without a hich. I have even played some games (Starcraft, Overwatch, Battlefield 4) on the machine, just to test the graphics card. Any issue with overheating or hardware instability would have shown during that time.
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Re: MGA 6 strange audio delay and distortion

Postby jeffrobins » Sep 2nd, '17, 05:29

I know mine is a software issue. It worked great under Windows and MGA5. It was the update to MGA6 that caused the problem.

Also, the fact that mpg123 and Firefox don't have an issue strongly suggests no problem with heat. Firefox uses more CPU than anything else, especially when Facebook is open.
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