There seems to be a well known bug with HD audio in Ubuntu which causes a loud click to be heard before playback. I was slightly confused initially when searching for fixes as all posts referred to this as Intel HDA and I’m running an AMD system. It turns out that the VIA VT1708S HD Audio chipset is used by both AMD and Intel motherboards and ALSA has support for this in the snd-hda-intel module.

The problem is that the snd-hda-intel module is set to power down the audio chip after 10 minutes. The causes a clicking noise before playback. The easy fix for this is to edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and look for this line:

# Power down HDA controllers after 10 idle seconds

below this, change the timeout from 10 to 0 like this:

options snd-hda-intel power_save=0 power_save_controller=N

and save the file. You’ll need to do this as superuser so either use “gksu gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf” or do it the hardcore way with nano!

Reboot!

Popularity: 28% [?]