Serious audio problems
I hope this is an acceptable post here as it is not a specific development question. Apologies also for the length.
I have an Acer Aspire 5102 laptop. AMD Turion 64 dual core processor, and Realtek 'soundcard'. 1gig RAM, running Vista.
When I play a wave file 100 seconds of 44.1, 16 bit 1.4kHz -6dB stereo tone at low level it plays fine through the on-board audio device using Windows Media Player.
When I play the same tone at higher volume, there are various problems as the level is changed. These include:
1. Audible gaps in the tone
2. The Media Player application becomes unresponsive
3. The Media Player can be closed, but audio continues to play.
4 . Other functions such as the software audio level control cease to respond
The audio level alters which of these problems is at the most critical, but playing tone at moderate to highish level always reveals serious problems. Other media player softwares show the same symptoms.
If I load the same file onto a usb memory stick, at the same levels the semi-lockups occur, but the audio plays without gaps.
Further tests reveal....
With the volume right up, 1k tone recorded at -20dB has gaps, 1k tone recorded at -40dB plays without any flaws.
So it is the actual audio level, not the gain setting.
With tone at -6, the tone plays with gaps. With white noise at approx -6, the noise plays constantly.
60 seconds of white noise followed by 60 seconds of tone, plays the white noise OK, but the tone breaks up.
Music played through the same machine has audible clicks and some glitches but might be acceptable for casual background noise, although not for any serious listening except at low level. Processor usage rises when the gaps occur. I have searched for but not found any strange audio settings, such as echo cancellation.
Today I visited a local branch of a chain-store, where the sales manager took my usb 'stick' and loaded my file onto 3 machines, only to discover that they all behaved exactly the same with varying degrees of the 'gaps' depending on the level.
The machines were:
Acer Aspire 5051 single core Turion Realtek HD audio
HP Pavilion D dual core Turion
HP DV9340 dual core Intel with 2 gigs ram. Connexant audio
What amazes me is that I have seen no reports of this anywhere.
Having removed some Acer 'empowering' software, an Edirol UA-20 usb soundcard seems to perform OK on the Acer machine.
Running Ubuntu Live on my laptop has slight audible glitches at high levels, but much lower than with Vista.
I would be interested in any suggestions as to what to do next. I know that these days laptop audio is not designed for anything more than voice chat, but UI lockups and audible gaps surely cannot be acceptable. I still think there might be some bizarre setting somewhere that I haven't found, but I have followed suggestions on Microsoft discussion forums to do with disabling all enhancements etc, without any effect.
[3022 byte] By [
WildDuck] at [2008-1-10]
You're right, that is fascinating.
My first suggestion would be to disable any audio enhancements (it's on one of the tabs on the "playback" tab in the sounds control panel). It's possible that a 3rd party system effect is causing the behavior you're seeing.
If that doesn't fix the problem, I'd love to see the files you're using so we can do some analysis here to see what's up.
If you're mixing different full dynamic range streams, then you may be seeing the effects of our "limiter" APO kicking in - it will reduce the volume of full dynamic range samples to prevent clipping, but it doesn't sound like that's what's going on here.
Many thanks for the response, Larry.
I have tried Control Panel-> Sound-> Playback-> Speakers->Enhancements and ticking disable all enhancements. All 4 optons were of status Disabled anyway. I then tried also unticking both options in turn in the advanced tab. The default format is set to 16 bit, 44100 Hz CD quality, which is the format of the files.
Adding the Acer 'enhancement' software seems to upset the Edirol drivers, but I've not discovered which bit and all that software has now gone.
The files are just plain audio files produced on Adobe Audition on 3 machines here. Some were made on AA 1.5, some on AA 2.0. Some were saved with the extended wave headers, some not. All files were deliberately restricted to being 16-bit, simple stereo, and no mixing was involved at any stage. I just used the AA 'Generate' function to produce the tone and the white noise.
The gaps on playback are step changes to silence, not what I would expect from a 'limiter'.
I'm happy to provide the files for anyone. What is the best way? I can either email them or possibly put them up on an old defunct website of mine. As they are wave files, the sizes are approx 10 megs per 60 seconds.
To follow-up, I've put a file up on my old website and would be very interested if anyone with a recent laptop would download it to try.
The crucial test is what happens when the file is played back in Windows Media Player at low audio level and at high audio level (ie the volume out of the loudspeakers) using the on-board audio interface.
The site address can be deduced from the following www.itsoundTAKETHISOUT.demon.co.uk/Audio
and note that the final word is case sensitive. The file is calledWhiteNoiseThenTone.wav.
Please don't take notice of the rest of the site - I'm effectively retired now.
More information.... I've made contact with only one other laptop owner, and he had not observed the problem, has now downloaded the file and tested. As a result of loading some of the programs he uses, I now observe the following here:
The gaps in audio when tone is played at high level occur when using Winamp, Media Player Classic and Windows Media Player 11.
They don't occur when the tone is played on the same machine from Adobe Audition 1.5 nor when played from my website (mentioned above) when using Firefox, which uses the Quicktime Player.
Edit: I should add that playing the file locally via the Quicktime player has the same gaps as Winamp etc., and only in the tone part of the file. Separately, I've made a white noise file of even higher level just to check that there is no chance that it's a level thing. It again plays fine.
I've been trying to use the SysInternals Process Monitor to see what is happening, and there do seem to be some differences, but nothing I really understand as yet.
I'm still hoping to find another one or two owners of recent Vista laptops who are prepared to try playing tone and compare notes.
Ideally, of course, it would be useful to know if Larry Osterman has tried the experiment, and what was found.
I'm still working on this and have two more observations.
Setting up the Vista playback mixer to control Windows Media Player 11 with a 1.4kHz tone and Adobe Audition 1.5 playing a 1kHz tone, it is easy to compare the two players and hear the beat note (or not). This clearly shows that the Media Player interruptions are 'before the fader' and appear when the level is increased on that fader. If the Audition fader is very high, however, it seems that that tone 'holds off' the Media player tone once it 'gaps' and drops to low level.
Playback is fine when using Adobe Audition 1.5. The later Audition 2.0 has the 'gaps in tone' effect, and, in fact, by setting the audio level to maximum I can get the whole laptop into an unresponsive state with what appears to be a small loop of tone repeating itself until the machine is powered down. Again, at low audio volumes, the tone plays fine on both apps. The difference between the two Adobe apps is that Audition 2.0 uses ASIO audio, and with this Realtek device is using an ASIO wrapper (Audition Windows Sound), whereas 1.5 does not.
In all this, I cannot detect any of the playback signal 'leaking' into the recording chain, and no alterations to the record selection seem to have any effect.
The contact who cannot reproduce this behaviour is using a Dell Latitude D820.
In case anyone else is testing this, I've added a temp email address to my profile.
I've only found one more person who is prepared to try playing an audio file of tone, and he has no problem. His machine has an EVGA NForce 680i SLi chipset which I think uses a Realtek ALC888 sound chip. His OS is Vista 64, as opposed to all the other machines that are 32-bit.
I'm still hoping that others can confirm or deny this effect. The count now is 4 machines that show the effect, and two that don't. It would be nice to find a pattern or hear from Microsoft.
The next observation is that on the laptop here, plugging headphones in to mute the speakers allows the audio to play correctly, and playing the files from CD or from the usb stick makes them play correctly (although I still see some problems with the UI while the audio is playing).
This leads to question whether maybe the buffering inherent in the CD drive and the speed of data from the usb flash memory might be helping the data flow to Media player. Is there anything different in the way the data proceeds from the different devices? The HD in this laptop is SATA with an 8meg buffer and 5400 rotational speed.
Also I seem to remember seeing reference somewhere to a registry setting that removes (and perhaps bypasses?) any DRM related processing or section of the audio chain. Does this info exist or did I dream it?
dude i need help. I cant hear audio in websites like youtube or myspace i dont know whats the problem i use vista basic can u help me
I feel that I really need some help here. I know that all these postings look a bit like spam, but this is, I feel a serious issue, and I haven't yet found anywhere better to discuss this (suggestions gratefully received).
Add to the list above a Medion 4754 Turion 64 x2 laptop. It shows the same symptoms - gaps in audio as the volume is increased and sluggish response of the UI when the volume is turned up, all only when playing audio tone.
This makes 5 different models of laptop that do this versus one that doesn't. They have Realtek or Conexant HD audio chipsets between them - can anyone confirm that these actually differ or is it just a badge thing? Desktop machines that have (other) Realtek chipsets seem not to have this problem, although I have only heard about 2 machines.
Today I've taken a new HD, installed it in my Acer 5102 laptop and installed XP Pro SP2 plus the current XP chipset, processor, video and audio drivers from the Acer ftp site. It behaves the same, gaps in my 1k tone at high level and the UI gets sluggish until the whole machine freezes. At low level it plays OK, with headphones plugged in it plays OK and the UI remains its normal self.
Between these makes of laptops, there must be tens, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of laptops being shipped. I had hoped to have retired from programming audio, but has no-one but me ever tried playing tone through these modern machines? If I have to, I'll try to work out how to write some diagnostic software, but some sort of meaningful discussion would be so much better.
I still think I may be being stupid, but this effect just cannot be acceptable if it is as common as it appears. Is there anywhere better to raise this issue?
WildDuck, we're absolutely not ignoring you, we've been actively investigating this on our end. We're not sure what's up, and given that the problem occurs onXP as well it appears that it may be a hardware issue.
I've got a machine with the same hardware codec on it, I'm trying the file on it.
Larry, many thanks. FWIW, the owner of the Dell D820, who has the only laptop found so far that doesn't show the effect, says it has Realtek HD Audio just like the two Acers I've tried, which do.
I really appreciate the interest.
Sell out your laptop, it is hardware problem:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=71010
Thanks,
Eugene.
WildDuck, it turns out that my laptop has the codec in question, and I can reproduce the problem on my machine.
We're trying to understand the failure right now.
Larry, It does appear the the problem occurs with more than one audio codec.
Another poster elsewhere in this thread pointed to a message that surmised that the voltage to the laptop hard drive and the usb ports was dropping when loud audio is played.
My measurements of the usb voltage here show that at idle, the voltage is 5.03 and when playing loud audio from the HD whilst simultaneously copying a large file, the lowest it ever drops is 4.96 volts. If this voltage is representative of the supply to the HD, this is well within the 5% tolerance quoted for the drive.
