Hello Joern, Are you using ALSA right ? Perhaps an OSS emulation problem of ALSA ? I recall that I got grabled sound (even lockups) on the SBLive when using 128byte fragments (seemed like a driver or hardware problem). What kind of audio card do you have ? Anyway latencytest is completely outdated (does not compile cleanly on newer distros due to wrong includes etc). Now that I have some spare time again (seems unbelievable but I were able to finish my university degree in CS just a month before turning 30 ... better late than newer as we use to say :-) ) I'll try to rewrite some of the useful tools including latencytest, adding alsa support and new stress test methods and like one guy of the list asked , the possibility to chose the disks (or the path) on which perform the disk i/o tests. Anyway low latency came useful in my thesis since a part of the project consisted in a real time laser scanner that tracks a laser spot that you move over the object you like to scan that is filmed by two cameras that permit a 3D reconstruction of the surface. (at 25 FPS we have processing cycles of 40msec so it is quite easy for the low lat patch to keep up since there is basically no disk i/o present during the scanning activity). cheers, Benno. --- You wrote: i ran latencytest on kernel 2.5.44-mm2 yesterday, and the audio was totally garbled, just barely recognizable. strangely, i could aplay somesound.wav simultaneously, and it sounded ok. (except for dropouts here and there.) might it be an oss problem ? i'm stumped. i habe never seen this before with the 2.5 kernels. regards, jörn