On Friday, August 26, 2016 8:27:39 AM EDT Ralf Mardorf wrote: On this Acer PC there's no HT setting, but a few others like SpeedStep, force XD bit, and some Intel VM setting. I turned all of it off and on, and several other settings, no change whatsoever in the digital noise, although turning off SpeedStep helped with some of the pops and clicks, as it usually does in most cases. On the store's PC, not sure I didn't check but HT is likely on, because it is a default setup store PC with no special needs. This Acer PC has shared video memory (ugh), so I tried a separate video card, no luck. T.

On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 18:19:17 -0400 termtech <termtech(a)rogers.com> wrote: Hi, Neither. I have this one for a few years now. There is no noise at all, at the moment. The problem is not steady. It can happen suddenly. I have linked somehow to the use of Bitwig although from your comments I now start to veer off towards the 10101LT capacitors. One thing: with a tone say of 1500HZ generated from the above web page, there is crackling as soon as the volume slider is moved from left to right repeatedly. No crackling otherwise. Compensating for audio variations could involve capacitors I think. If they start to fail then shaking the volume slider could produce noise, could it ? It"s also an Asus board in this machine. I always get Asus since some time. Replacing the capacitors could be something to do. Are they easy to get ? How many of these are on the card ? OTOH, I was at the music store recently and upon mentioning 1010LT the remarks went on about age and who is older. Maybe it could be time to upgrade to a newer card. Maybe. I have no idea on what's on the market that plays very well for Linux. I'll start another thread. Cheers.

On Friday, August 26, 2016 5:04:12 AM EDT jonetsu(a)teksavvy.com wrote: OK. Make sure you try some of the following: Turn off any SpeedStep or Cool n' Quiet BIOS settings. These are CPU clock throttling mechanisms that ARE well known to produce pops and clicks (but not the digital noise I mentioned). Turning them off or adjusting them is known to solve many cases of clicks and pops. I found some tools in Linux for handy speed settings such as a neat 'indicator-cpufreq' taskbar icon where you can adjust the throttling mechanisms. You get 'performance' 'on demand' 'power save' modes etc. as well as a dozen or so specific CPU frequencies to choose from. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work. No matter what I choose doesn't seem to affect anything. "grep -E '^model name|^cpu MHz' /proc/cpuinfo" shows no change in the CPU cores' frequencies. (SpeedStep is currently enabled.) Speaking of which, I also tried adjusting the card's interrupt CPU affinity settings (on interrupt #20) : sudo echo [desired CPU bit pattern] > "/proc/irq/20/smp_affinity" and "cat /proc/irq/20/smp_affinity" No change in noise. Hm, well in my case, when the digital noise is present, simply moving the mouse around, across borders and so on, affects the noise. The volume slider thing may be normal, possibly just the way the site works, not seamlessly switching volumes. (I mention in another post this MB is shared video memory, so I tried a video card, but no luck.) Mm, as I say that could just be the site and the volume slider making pops. If weak capacitors are involved you'd likely get some kind of noise with any operation, even just playing a sound. Yeah, one of the best. Love 'em. You should be adept at soldering and have a good iron. This is a double sided (likely multi-layered) board so the iron needs to be good and not lose heat quickly to surrounding copper, metal etc. You'll likely want de-soldering braided wick, or a de-soldering pump, to remove the solder from the holes, although luckily with caps having just two legs you can sometimes get away with just pushing the two legs of the new capacitor through the solder-filled holes one at a time. As for the actual caps, I can't look now 'cause it's installed, but I did of course see cheap non-Japanese caps in there (never a good thing). In particular, you'll want to start with the largest ones, near the 7805 +5V voltage regulator. Good power bypassing is a crucial start. I wouldn't worry too much about all the other small ones, most of them are signal decoupling caps and if bad you would likely get steady clipping or weak signals instead of digital noise or infrequent (non-clipping-related) pops. Still, some of the smaller caps can be power supply bypass caps so eventually you may have to make your way to them. As a repair tech, I have dealt with thousands of noisy situations like this. Bad converter bits, weak data buses, noisy supply lines... Seen it all. Anyone who has ever brought a hand close to a CD player's sensitive optical pickup cable will know the noise that is produced. That's sort of, kind of, the digital noise I'm getting. I suspect that if I open this PC's case and start touching the 1010 card with my fingers, providing some extra capacitance and conductance, something would snap into place - it is that close to functioning fully properly. I hate being defeated by crap like this so I am thinking of trying that when I get a chance. I hate when stuff has to be discarded. I may just hook up my oscilloscope to try and find out what's going on. It may reveal bad caps... * Insider's tip: Freeze spray is your best friend! Get a can of it, or use an upside down can of compressed air (it makes freeze spray when upside down). Spray the capacitors, semiconductors, even the copper traces on the board, to reveal bad caps, bad semiconductors, bad traces etc. Then watch for the symptoms to appear or disappear. Guaranteed to easily reveal bad caps in virtually ALL situations. (The chemical electrolyte heats up / cools down.) The inverse is also helpful: Heat the top of the metal cans of the capacitors with the soldering iron tip and watch for changes. I may try it and report back... Yeah exactly, I am (or was) searching for possible replacements so I am curious what is out there, good to start a thread on this. Seemed there's not much comparable to this card, new products out there seem to start in the hundreds of dollars :-( Particularly USB devices I'd like to know how well they perform, latency etc. Tim.

On Fri, 26 Aug 2016, jonetsu(a)teksavvy.com wrote: I have read (means do some more research) that the d1010 had the best (best out fo the delta stuff) ADCs the d66/d44 had one step down and the 1010LT are yet another step down. The PCI interface chip (ice1712) itself has no ADC/DAC within the chip, they are separate. There are people on the list who have had the d1010 open and upgraded some bits in them. The other thing to remember is that the delta 1010 has it's analog bits in a separate box. So just in real estate, The d1010 has lots, the d66/44 has less and the 1010lt has the least having twice the analog channels and preamps as well. I would expect the 1010lt has as many ADCs on one chip as they could find. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net

On Fri, 26 Aug 2016, jonetsu(a)teksavvy.com wrote: Same with my d66. I happened to have a mixer with preamps and direct outs (from tape days, Fostex R8 as happens). IN any case, even buying a used d1010 would cost more than a new 1010lt. (some of which seem to show up once in a while) It does depend on the use imagined. Portable with fewest possible boxes... probably go USB. 1818vsl or something like that. Put up with higher latency. Check it with each USB plug on the machine with no mouse plugged in if it is a laptop to find the one that works best (doesn't reuse an irq or get shared with some internal usb bit). If the computer used can take internal cards, it sounds like it can, add a new good USB port. It sounds like cost is important and that will limit you to USB AIs. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net

On Fri, 26 Aug 2016, termtech wrote: I have found that too, I use cpufreq-set and cpufreq-info instead. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net

On Friday, August 26, 2016 9:22:59 PM EDT Ralf Mardorf wrote: Thanks! I entered the commands and made sure it was on performance, but no luck. Same terrible noise. I know it does help with some of the pops and clicks though. Just not the digital noise. I'll see how the new replacement MB works out. Hopefully it will remain stable. It worked fine in the shop... T.

On Fri, 26 Aug 2016, Len Ovens wrote: should be higher ^^^^ -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net

On Sat, 27 Aug 2016, jonetsu(a)teksavvy.com wrote: dbus passes it's pid (or is it some other number) so that things like session or system can run different instanses of dbus. In my experiments with audio in a cli only system using VTs or screen. I found when using VTs I have to start a dbus version and capture it's PID from the environment in that instance and then add that to each of the VTs I was using. I was then able to run jackdbus on one VT and pulseaudio on another and have module-jackdbusdetect find jackdbus. I could use jack_control from yet another VT to talk to jackdbus and make changes (different device, buffersize or whatever). With screen I found I could just get dbus to start screen and all bash instances inside that would see the same dbus. dbus is interesting, it passes messages from one application to another, but, it also will try to start the process the message is being sent to if it is not yet running. So my guess is that some application is trying to talk to pulseaudio on a second dbus instance and so pulse starts and can't get the audio device(s) because another PA already has then (your session) and so it trys to signal the Audio port hold to give it up and fails that too... it fails and because of the respawn ends up stuck (defunct). So it sounds like your session may be started in a wrong manner, perhaps something that worked with an older version dbus, but does not any more. It seems to me at one time running dbus twice was quite common using each one to get a different value to pass to the environment. These days dbus starts the session passing both values to the environment on it's own. You may have heard of alsa-in and alsa-out that comes with jack? This is a better version of the same thing... uses less cpu and still has a much better sound quality. (Thank you Fons) http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/zita-ajbridge-doc/quickguide.h… Jackd1 now include this code so far as I know. (I use jackd2 cause it comes in the distro :P ) First asumption: you have more than one audio interface (1010 and internal audio) second asunption: bitwig grabs both and keeps them open. third asumption: bitwig bases its sync on the first AI it can find (internal) and refills it's buffers based on that. If you can disable the internal audio does this problem go away? If you can't disable in bios, maybe unload the right kernel module will have the same effect. having two AIs open in the same application with no resample will very much make noise. Also you should try running at 48000sample/sec, just to see if that makes any difference. I once had an internal AI where one of the devices (A mic as happens) was 48K only and it caused crackles when PA was set to 44100 (the default) because the internal AI "said" that was ok. A good MB should not have this... I seen enough wierd stuff I don't count much out. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net