motive

I’ve been having trouble to find the time I wanted to actually post here, so here goes a quick tip I found out a while ago.

small nuisance

After I upgraded my desktop OS to Debian 10 (which I’m liking a lot), a quite annoying electrical noise started to come out of the speakers after a few seconds without any actual sound playback. Basically, with the speakers turned on, unless I put some music or movie, static would come until another sound was to be played from the computer, then a few seconds later, start again.

So I have found out the reason. On Debian 10 the hda_intel codec (something like AC97) powersave feature got turned on by default. That means that without a sound signal (even if it’s a “null” signal), your speakers or phone may output static from its power supply or whatever. To disable it try the following:

# echo 0 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save

This next snippet will make this configuration permanent:

# echo "options snd_hda_intel power_save=0" > /etc/modprobe.d/disable_powersave.conf

Supposedly (I couldn’t test) this other snipped does the same for AC97, in case that’s your codec:

# echo "options snd_ac97_codec power_save=0" > /etc/modprobe.d/disable_powersave.conf

If you need to figure out your codec do this next thing:

# lspci -k -s $(lspci | grep -i audio | cut -f 1 -d' ')

It wasn’t a quick find. Took me a few months to finally get fed up with the sound and figure it out to the end. Hopefully, if you’ve got this issue, you won’t lose as much time as I did ;)

Until next time…