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There is a slight hissing sound / noise in my headphones (3.5 jack) continuously.

It used to be really bad but since I disabled loopback in the alsamixer it's much better.

Are there any obvious fixes that I should try to get rid of any stand-by noises?

I have no microphone connected.

Rtsne42
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2 Answers2

1

I had the same issue on my Asus UX501 laptop. Solved it by turning off the Intel Audio Powersave as seen in : Strange noise in headphones when no sound is played

After replacing the location of the file, my terminal command looked like this:

gksudo gedit /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/intel-audio-powersave

then I changed the line

INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE=${INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE:-true}

to

INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE=false

After a reboot my issue was solved.

Ravexina
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A lot of users are facing noise problem when headphones are connected There are a lot of solutions given on Ask Ubuntu but none have worked for me.

I didn't have this problem when I used Windows 8.1, but I don't want to go back to Windows.

I have accepted the fact that my laptop's sound system is not shielded properly.

I haven't addressed the root of the problem, but just kind of made it a virtually unnoticable.

So, the hack is quite simple. As the problem persists only when there is no playback, I came up with a hack to always have a playback!

Now, this should be true only when the headphones are connected. And the playback should stop when headphones are removed.

Follow these simple steps:

Step #1: Install mplayer and configure it.

sudo apt install mplayer    
nano ~/.mplayer/config  

type in that file

lirc=no

save and exit.

Step #2: Download this mp3 file silence-10sec.mp3.

Step #3: Create a folder in home directory and name it .hush
Copy the mp3 file in your .hush directory

cp ~/Downloads/silence-10sec.mp3 ~/.hush/

In that folder, create a script file and name it silence.sh
Copy paste this code in the script file.

#!/bin/bash

plugged="jack/headphone HEADPHONE plug"
unplugged="jack/headphone HEADPHONE unplug"

acpi_listen | while IFS= read -r event;
do
    if [ "$event" == "$plugged" ]
    then
       mplayer -really-quiet -loop 0 ~/.scripts/silence-10sec.mp3 &
    elif [ "$event" == "$unplugged" ]
    then
       pkill -f mplayer
    fi
done

Make it executable with the command chmod +755 silence.sh

Step #4: Type startup applications in the Dash and add the path of silence.sh script to it.

Startup applications dialog

So, basically what we are doing is listening to events of headphones being connected and disconnected and playing or stopping the blank mp3 file in a loop. Now, I have used mplayer because I know that I am never gonna use that for any other purpose and killing its process is completely safe for me.

I came up with this idea when Serg answered one of my questions.

He came up with this script and I just made modifications to it to suit the requirement.

Zanna
  • 70,465
  • Is this still your solution today or have you managed to address the root problem? – forgetso Nov 22 '18 at 13:48
  • I am no longer running the script as the problem has been resolved since i upgraded to 16.04.2. – thewebjackal Nov 25 '18 at 15:39
  • I can only hope they fix it for XPS 9370 soon... – forgetso Nov 25 '18 at 15:44
  • Yup. You can use this as a workaround until then. Give a +1 if this helps. – thewebjackal Dec 07 '18 at 15:36
  • I've not used the fix as playing a silent mp3 doesn't sit well with me. Plus, I've not had time to tune power usage yet so this will be additional drain on an already limited battery time... – forgetso Dec 10 '18 at 09:04
  • You are on 16.04? I would recommend you to switch to 18.04.1. It's quite good when it comes to battery life. I did a minimal install so no bloatware. All light and nice. Gives upto 6 hours of battery life. Just a suggestion. – thewebjackal Dec 10 '18 at 11:50
  • I'm on 18.04 but I'm coming from a mac. The battery life is shocking in comparison. – forgetso Dec 10 '18 at 20:36