Installed on a new PC with an ASUS H97M-Plus motherboard, got everything to work except the audio.
While I have sound, and the mixers and volume controls appear to work correctly, the audio is very distorted. The speaker-test command for example emits a series of loud pops, which continue for about 5 seconds after being stopped. The system alert sound repeats about 20 times, getting shorter on each repeat (bit like a skipping CD), an mp3 in vlc sounds dreadful, but for HD video in VLC or playing a video in youtube, sound is for the most-part OK.
I have tried everything and almost anything suggested on this issue, all the suggestions make it only very slightly better (or worse).
What it is not:
something I installed - boot from live USB has the same issue.
PulseAudio (killing it and using VLC direct to alsa is just as bad).
helped by changes to the intel-hda driver arguments (tried many of them such as disable power management, disable msi, model=asus, model=generic, model=auto, none of these resulted in any change in behaviour).
outdated/corrupted alsa/audio drivers - reinstalling results in the same behaviour.
A conflict with the Graphics card - it occurs even when that is removed.
An IRQ conflict - see /proc/interrupts below
cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 CPU1 CPU2 CPU3 0: 16 0 0 0 IO-APIC-edge timer 1: 32306 193 147 107 IO-APIC-edge i8042 5: 0 0 0 0 IO-APIC-edge parport0 7: 7 0 0 0 IO-APIC-edge 8: 0 0 0 1 IO-APIC-edge rtc0 9: 0 0 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi acpi 16: 1760713 10458 490808 424669 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb1, ath9k 17: 1012 62 49 44 IO-APIC-fasteoi 22: 577 0 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi 23: 46 1 4 10 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb2 41: 718982 157194 22770 10318 PCI-MSI-edge xhci_hcd 42: 39688 164281 587946 296079 PCI-MSI-edge ahci 43: 12 0 0 0 PCI-MSI-edge mei_me 44: 419627 0 195 7504 PCI-MSI-edge eth0 45: 915 0 0 0 PCI-MSI-edge snd_hda_intel 46: 533177 14245 7497 7726 PCI-MSI-edge nvidia 47: 0 0 0 0 PCI-MSI-edge snd_hda_intel NMI: 27 139 138 133 Non-maskable interrupts LOC: 3254256 2931833 2913952 2776206 Local timer interrupts SPU: 0 0 0 0 Spurious interrupts PMI: 27 139 138 133 Performance monitoring interrupts IWI: 137941 104702 117956 109883 IRQ work interrupts RTR: 5 1 0 0 APIC ICR read retries RES: 1229699 1197933 1276401 1194185 Rescheduling interrupts CAL: 2473 2524 2531 2830 Function call interrupts TLB: 93921 105819 135776 115012 TLB shootdowns TRM: 0 0 0 0 Thermal event interrupts THR: 0 0 0 0 Threshold APIC interrupts MCE: 0 0 0 0 Machine check exceptions MCP: 116 115 115 115 Machine check polls ERR: 7 MIS: 0
Internal audio is IRQ 45, GFX card audio is IRQ 47.
Output of alsa-info.txt is too long for here, so it is at http://pastebin.com/3wegASFh
The odd thing is, if I make the application playing audio consume more CPU (eg by rolling mouse over some links or scrolling up and down, the audio will 'come-good' while that activity is occurring.
Is there anything that can fix this, or it just a matter of waiting for better driver support?