I am on the latest Manjaro GNOME. When in performance mode, all audio starts crackling. When set to balanced mode audio works alright. Happens both with pipewire and pulseaudio.
It happens on all Kernels after 5.4., but not on 5.4.
Hello, and sorry for the delay. I just got time to try this.
I turned off PipeWire and tried with the command you gave. There is audible crackling in the test.
So, this means it’s an ALSA issue? How do I go about solving it?
Here is the alsa-balanced.txt https://pastebin.com/bvqPSgjr
And here is the alsa-performance.txt https://pastebin.com/yN3q3bvn
There were several differences between the files in Meld, but I could not understand anything since I am not an expert. Maybe you can help figure things out.
I suggest remove all of these options from /etc/modprobe.d/ folder
(or remove options in /etc/default/grub configuration and sudo update-grub)
then reboot system and check audio
If crackling is still audible, remove ALSA loopback device
modprobe -r snd-aloop
If crackling is still audible, reboot system and run sudo alsa-info.sh --stdout > alsa-performance.txt for kernel v6.6
Most of the ALSA data looks ok, but audio capture levels are set to maximum:
Simple mixer control 'Capture',0
Capabilities: cvolume cswitch
Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Capture 0 - 63
Front Left: Capture 63 [100%] [30.00dB] [on]
Front Right: Capture 63 [100%] [30.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Internal Mic Boost',0
Capabilities: volume
Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: 0 - 3
Front Left: 3 [100%] [30.00dB]
Front Right: 3 [100%] [30.00dB]
Total of 60.0dB boost would make audio capture extremely noisy and distorted. The audio codec does not have microphone monitoring, but the excessive noise in audio capture could be inducing noise in the playback channels
I suggest set both levels to 0 and turn off audio capture:
The crackling sounds like it might be the audio buffering. I used to use DAWs a while back making music and if you set the sample buffer really short for low latency when using high sample rates the output caught up to the buffer it would crackle. This is tiny pauses in the audio that make popping sounds as it loads in the next bit of audio. So the settings you have might be making the audio buffer too short for the audio you are playing. Don’t know if you can control the audio buffer in Manjaro though. Definitely not your speakers.