Guest arromdee Posted December 2, 2002 Report Share Posted December 2, 2002 Whenever the light is on on either my DVD or CD-RW drive, sound on my system is bad. I can even hear the sound waver in time with the light's flashing. This makes DVDs impossible to play, among other problems. This is on Mandrake 9. My sound card is a Shark Predator ISA using an AD1816A. Some details: -- Yes, DMA is turned on on the drive. Yes, really. -- I can swap out my hard drive and put in the old hard drive with my Mandrake 8 install. If I do, the sound works properly, so it's not a hardware problem. -- The problem isn't application-specific. Anything that uses either drive causes the problem. -- Using the exact same version of Alsa I had before doesn't fix the problem (and I'll tell you, it's a pain to compile an old version of Alsa on Mandrake 9). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzatch Posted December 3, 2002 Report Share Posted December 3, 2002 Are the hard drive and dvd rom on the same power line? If so maybe the new hard drive requires just enough extra juice to slow the dvd down. Try changing the power line to one coming out of the power supply seperate from the other two. just an idea? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
static Posted December 3, 2002 Report Share Posted December 3, 2002 I would have said something like that too, but for the fact that it works in 8! Strange, man. Strange. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest arromdee Posted December 3, 2002 Report Share Posted December 3, 2002 The DVD isn't being slowed down at all. It's the sound that's being slowed down. All I can guess it could be is some kind of DMA or IRQ problem that nobody notices because you need to have an ISA soundcard to get the problem. I'm at the point where I'm wondering if it's a kernel bug. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzatch Posted December 4, 2002 Report Share Posted December 4, 2002 I don't think you canslow down the sound card. I do think that the new hard drive could draw to much power and slow the dvd's drive motor down thereby making it read slow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzatch Posted December 4, 2002 Report Share Posted December 4, 2002 If you old hard drive is a slow one (I.E. 5400rpm) and the new one is faster and larger(I.E. 7200rpm) the new does indeed draw a bit more power than the old. It has to be a hardware problem since you are switching hardware to get it to work now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest starbane Posted December 4, 2002 Report Share Posted December 4, 2002 I've had this problem on all kinds of operating systems (from Dos/Win3.1 and up). It IS a hardware problem - usually having to do with wire routing and power 'bleeding' over. The fact that it didn't happen on 8 was probably due to 8 not fully utilising the card. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ab2ms Posted December 4, 2002 Report Share Posted December 4, 2002 are you by any chance using an ECS cheapo motherboard? if so I had the same problem,(well the weird sound part) caused by using a pci video card and had to get an agp and all is well. My prob was mobo specific. May help, otherwise I'm stumped. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest arromdee Posted December 4, 2002 Report Share Posted December 4, 2002 The DVD drive is definitely not reading slowly. The problem happens with *any application* (and on both drives)--if I use a drive to rip a CD, and I play a .wav file at the same time, the .wav file has a sound problem for as long as the light on the drive is on. Besides, the video's always correct, it's just the sound. 8 can't be 'not fully utilising the card'. It has the same version of Alsa. It is not an ECS motherboard. It is a KT7A. (And how would a power problem cause a sound problem? It might cause a drive reading problem, but that isn't what the problem is.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzatch Posted December 5, 2002 Report Share Posted December 5, 2002 If your using a power supply thats to small( not enough watts) then it cant get all of your little drive motors up to full speed. When the light is not on in the dvd or cdrom drive the motor is off and the drive is just coasting. But when it needs to read it tries to bring the drive up to speed(They read WAY faster than your computer can play the file and sound like music). If your hard drive, CPU fan, power supply fan, cdrom motor and dvd motor are trying to all run at once then even a 1% drop in drive speed(electric power) can make it sound just like an old record player. Cd-rom and DVD drives are supposed to stop reading at a set point and try to speed up the motor if they are not fast enough, but yours could be hovering inside the limit of fast enough for a good data read and not fast enough to speed up the motor. How does it play if your not using everything at once? This also applies the other way. If your using all you power to burn( it takes quite a bit to run that laser). Are you running the wav file off the hard drive? If you are then your asking the hard drive for info from quite a few places at once and of cource it would slow down. The GUI once running has very little info to get from the hard drive, it mostly uses the ram. Unless your accually running a vidio. How does windows do while your doing all this does it handle it better?. My bet is its the same. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest starbane Posted December 6, 2002 Report Share Posted December 6, 2002 The DVD drive is definitely not reading slowly. The problem happens with *any application* (and on both drives)--if I use a drive to rip a CD, and I play a .wav file at the same time, the .wav file has a sound problem for as long as the light on the drive is on. Besides, the video's always correct, it's just the sound. 8 can't be 'not fully utilising the card'. It has the same version of Alsa. It is not an ECS motherboard. It is a KT7A. (And how would a power problem cause a sound problem? It might cause a drive reading problem, but that isn't what the problem is.) http://alive.singnet.com.sg/tech/click.htm http://www.driverforum.com/sound4/2099.html Just a couple more solutions to an incredibly common problem. Dell suggest checking monitor cables (how routed) A lot of other sites suggest video card driver updates (AGP/PCI bus noise related, certainly). Mandrake 9 uses Alsa 9rc2. 8.2 used ALSA 0.5.12a, originally. With 9 I get four speaker sound on my Hercules Muse (cmedia 8738). With 8.2 it required a kernel rebuild/patch. So I think that speakes to driver differences between 8.2 and 9 and the versions of Alsa they use. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest arromdee Posted December 6, 2002 Report Share Posted December 6, 2002 The sound problem is not caused by the DVD drive slowing down. First, the video is always fine. Second, the problem happens *no matter where I play the sound from*. I can play an MP3 off the hard drive too and get the problem. It's not the hard drive being slow either. The concept of the drive being so slow that it takes longer to read the MP3 than to play it is ridiculous. It's not the monitor cables. As I said, when I swap back in the old hard drive with my Mandrake 8 on it, it works. Why exactly would a video card driver problem only show up while the DVD or CD drive's light is on? And yes, when I said I used the same version of Alsa, I meant it. I had various versions of Alsa 9 on my Mandrake 8 system--you can get Alsa and install it separately, after all. And then I installed the exact same version of Alsa 9 on my Mandrake 9 system (which actually meant installing a version that was a bit older). There are no driver differences. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest JaseP Posted December 6, 2002 Report Share Posted December 6, 2002 I think you were right on track about an IRQ conflict or DMA conflict. Try turning DMA off on the DVD-ROM drive using the jumper. If that solves it, you know it is a DMA problem. Next, try going into the BIOS and fiddling with the Plug and Play IRQ settings. It may be that the IRQs are shared between the devices in a way that prevents their simultaneous use. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest starbane Posted December 10, 2002 Report Share Posted December 10, 2002 What version of ALSA are you/were you running? And with what options? RPM or source compile? Why would you install an older version of ALSA on 9? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest arromdee Posted December 10, 2002 Report Share Posted December 10, 2002 I was running 0.9.0 beta 10. It was from source and included a patch to work correctly on my sound card (my card didn't work, and I was corresponding with a developer; we got it fixed and the patch went into the official beta 11). Why would I install an old version on the current Mandrake? So that when I reported my bug, people would not start telling me "oh, you had a different version of Alsa, maybe that's the source of your problem, why don't you try installing the old version and then get back to us". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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