[Wizard] Wizard audio

[Cameron Patrick]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 04:01:20PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
| >| It's the drivers, not the Wizard.
| >
| >I find this hard to believe given that (a) the noise is present even
| >when nothing is being sent to the audio device, and (b) it coincides
| >with network traffic and graphics updates.  This, to me, suggests it's
| >picking noise from sundry other hardware in the Wizard....?
| 
| I found the same - I've got really good headphones, and it was _really_ 
| obvious whenever the system was doing anything. The disk was definitely 
| the main culprit, though.

Ahh, at least I know I'm not going mad.  I'm not using headphones, but
have speakers and amp which should be significantly better than the
average computer set-up... :-)  Although I don't even /have/ a disk
connected on this machine.

| I may disable the disk and netboot it, which should reduce the noise
| considerably.

Mine is running entirely off an NFS root, playing music stored on a
machine in another room.  Those 5GB laptop drives are not only a bit
small, but also surprisingly whiney - to me, more annoying than the hum
from the fans and hard drives of my desktop.

| That said, it's not impossible (especially on such odd hardware) that
| the drivers are capable of boosting the output gain or some other odd
| thing.

I hadn't thought of that.  Upping the gain would probably help it,
assuming it could be done from some point before the noise was picked
up.  I did notice that even on maximum output volume set in aumix it
produced a lower level signal with more noise than my SB Live (which is
in turn quieter than the onboard audio in the same machine) - and the SB
Live is hooked up through ~7m of RCA cabling!

Cameron.