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Issue:

Occasionally the two front speakers will begin to buzz in an infuriating fashion and nothing I do seems to get them to stop. They will however, stop on their own after minutes, hours or days. I've yet to be able to discern any rhyme or reason to it.

I think I have the same/similar issue as shown in this video

Perhaps related? There's something wrong with my battery so that when I unplug, the computer will often (but not always) die shortly after. Most often it's instant, sometimes it's within a few minutes, rarely it will continue to stay on indefinitely. I've tried resetting the battery by sticking a pin into the reset hole but have otherwise just left it alone.

System Info:

I am running Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS on an Acer Predator 17. My Linux level is fairly low.

$ pulseaudio --check -v
I: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon running as PID 2655

$ cat /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save_controller
Y

$ lspci | grep -i audio
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation 100 Series/C230 Series Chipset Family HD Audio Controller (rev 31)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GP106 High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)

What I've Tried:

I have tried following along here: Buzzing from external speakers, think it's related to power management but the solution in the comments did not work for me.

Following that thread I tried mv ~/.config/pulse ~/.config/old_pulse reboot then sudo alsa force-reload but it did nothing.

$ ls -l /etc/modprobe.d/idle-audio.conf
file not found

following the solution in the link above I created /etc/modprobe.d/idle-audio.conf using nano and wrote options snd_hda_intel power_save=0 in it. 

$ ls -l /etc/modprobe.d/idle-audio.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35 May 13 12:03 /etc/modprobe.d/idle-audio.conf

This also did nothing.

Seeking:

Any solution that stops this infernal buzzing! Specifically, is there a way to completely power down the speakers through software? The issue shown in this video (same as above) is "fixed" by simply unplugging the speakers. A software method to "unplug" the speakers would be good because I do not want to have to open up my laptop and fiddle around with wires inside every time I need to turn my speakers back on.

I am totally open to any ideas though! Thank you!

bRost03
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  • My guess is that the buzzing is a hardware grounding issue. It is not software. The speakers are getting electricity in the wrong place and buzzing. Can be a bad wire, or bad plug. Happens to all of us. Try touching things in different places. You become the ground and the buzzing can go on and off. – walttheboss May 13 '20 at 23:10
  • Thanks for the suggestion. Since posting this I have also become convinced it's a hardware issue as I had the buzzing happen while I was playing around with the BIOS. If I do as you suggest @walttheboss and indeed find a place where touching the board stops the buzzing what then? My hardware knowledge is pretty minimal, anything I should be aware of so as to not fry my computer? – bRost03 May 14 '20 at 17:32
  • To generate a low grade buzz you dont' need much power. That means that grounding the buzz will not take much. If you do in fact find that touching removes the sound you can ground from there. You could first try to reseat any speaker cables. The unscrew and retighten the screw holding the speakers. One thing to try is removing and lint from the headphone jacks(s). A very small short in the headphone jack will cause a buzz like that. Get some contact cleaner. Disconnect the battery. Spray the jacks after cleaning physically. – walttheboss May 14 '20 at 21:54

0 Answers0