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I'm using Ubuntu 21.10 and have just started getting strange audio outputs on my laptop speakers, despite nothing playing.

The sound itself is quite hard to describe, but sounds roughly like a sort of modulated white noise sound. It is also quite loud, and plays out of the laptop speakers, and is unaffected by system volume (this has lead to a few embarrassing meetings where I can't make my laptop stop making this weird noise and just have to reboot).

It seems to be triggered somewhat randomly, but I can also force it to happen by:

  • playing any audio (i.e. a youtube video)
  • running a pulseaudio ... command
  • opening the sound section of the settings app

I found the following questions which sound like the same issue, but neither solutions have worked for me:

Some details of the system:

  • Razer Blade 15 2022 (has a nvidia discrete GPU, and an Alder Lake 12th gen CPU, both of which have caused other driver-related issues)
  • uname -r: 5.13.0-35-generic
  • Ubuntu 21.10
  • Dual booting Windows 11 (worth mentioning Windows has no such sound issues)
  • Secure boot is off, as is Windows fast boot

Any help would be very appreciated

cameron1024
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  • Reinstall sound -related software? pulseaudio? – Hannu Mar 21 '22 at 23:08
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    Do you also have this problem when you boot from your usb-stick (with which you installed Ubuntu with the same software) running a 'live' system? – Joepie Es Mar 21 '22 at 23:10
  • journalctl --xef show any relevant log? You can get the list of current applications using the sound card with pacmd list-sink-inputs | grep application\\.name – Pablo Bianchi Mar 21 '22 at 23:15
  • journalctl -xef doesn't show anything obviously sound-related when I trigger the issue. pacmd ... doesn't show anything even when youtube is playing in the background. I don't know if it is a pulseaudio issue, because the behaviour is the same if I run killall pulseaudio. I'll try running off the USB stick and see if I get the same behaviour – cameron1024 Mar 21 '22 at 23:32
  • I encountered the same issue. From time to time a pulsating sound would get louder and louder (which seemed to emerge from somewhere close to the loudspeakers which were switched off) and then suddenly stop. I suspected a fan to be the culprit as they are close to the loudspeakers. Now the issue hasnt occurred again since a day working on the laptop. I am unsure if it is complete coincidence, but the only thing I changed was uninstalling the installed nvidia drivers (sudo apt purge \*nvidia\* \*cuda\* \*nvrtc\* & reinstalling cuda and cudnn and xorg) because I had issues with the GPU – mutableVoid Aug 26 '22 at 16:34
  • I wouldn't think this would be related, but I thought I should post it for the slim chance that it could help you. Maybe it is simply coinccidence or another little thing I did that fixed this issue. I am also on a newer kernel (5.19.3) and had the same issue on it and on the LTS kernel. My issue was that nvidia-smi could not communicate to the nvidia driver. However, maybe my issue was different from yours because you were able to force it to happen which I could not. – mutableVoid Aug 26 '22 at 16:37
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    I had an update, but forgot about this question: it seemed to be related to windows dual boot. Booting into windows, using "restart", then switching to ubuntu (or any other linux) would cause the error. If I booted into windows, then "shutdown", then boot into linux, the speakers would work fine. I'm no expert in this area, but I wonder if windows is leaving some state in the devices that persist between restarts (but not shutdowns) – cameron1024 Aug 26 '22 at 22:49
  • Thanks for posting this! For me the problem re-emerged after briefly rebooting into windows as well (alongside with some issues with the wifi network interface), and your post helped me identify the reason! :) – mutableVoid Aug 30 '22 at 06:45

1 Answers1

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I had the same problem on the same machine (razer late 2022), and indeed it was partially solved by shutting down windows instead of rebooting. However,the microphone still doesn't work, and the "left/right" test output is reversed.

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Danny
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