Distorted sound unless PAVUCONTROL is open?

Question

Seems as though there ought to be a simple solution to this:

My sound comes through a jack in the back of a Samsung HDMI monitor. If pavucontrol (Pulse Audio Volume Control) is running (if the window/dialog box is open) then the sound is flawless. As soon as I close it, the sound is badly distorted. Open it? Perfect. Close it? Distorted. Any ideas? All my Google searches are dead ends. Seems like there must be a file that needs to be tweaked somewhere?

Whatever settings pavucontrol is using, are perfect; but are "dis-invoked" as soon as I close the app?

Using 14.04.

Answer 1

Okay, I seem to have found a solution. It comes from here.

The gist of it is this:

In the /etc/pulse directory are the following files:

client.conf daemon.conf default.pa system.pa

Step 1: sudo nano default.pa

Look for the following lines:

*Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
Ugly hack for Nexus 10
.ifexists /system/lib/hw/audio.primary.manta.so
load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0
.else
load-module module-udev-detect
.endif*

Step 2: Hash them all out, and put in the line:

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

So, we're eliminating the if/then statement and invoking the "ugly hack" that worked for the NEXUS 10, which just happens to work for my armhf Cubox-i (and might work in other systems).