[RESPONDED] Headphone jack intermittent noise?

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Hi,

Chiming in here after spending a few hours trying to diagnose these problems on my Framework 13 (11th gen, Batch 8) runing mostly Ubuntu (23.10 at the moment) and W11.

I already noticed the static hiss and beep noise when power state changes from the beginning, but recently also started noticing the weird crackling sound while playing audio (which is much more annoying). Exactly the same as noticed by @Andrew_Marshall
in [RESPONDED] Headphone jack intermittent noise? - #54 by Andrew_Marshall.

As I spent some time running tests and reading some topics, I would like to summarize what I’ve learn about the current state of the 3 different problems discussed here:

  1. The static hiss in the background, that some people are hearing and others are not. Which is present while playing anything and can stop (or not depending on power saving settings) a few seconds after you stop playing anything: I confirmed this one in all my OS (Ubuntu 23.10, 22.04 and W11) while running on battery as well as plugged-in. As many people already said it’s present on almost every hardware version and is impossible to resolve, it’s simply the DAC hardware quality and/or electronic filtering / isolation which is lacking I suppose. It’ll be much easier to hear with more sensitve / low impedence hearphones like my Sennheiser IE 300, but is very quiet with higher impedence headphones like my Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro. So it’s not necessarily about higher/lower quality but if you have the choice, you can use a higher impedence headset to mitigate this.

  2. The beeping sound we hear when we start playing something and a couple seconds after the audio is finished, which has been diagnosed as being the noise made by the chip when coming in/out of power saving mode. Pretty annoying especially as the volume is fixed so with sensitive headphones it’s very loud. This one is apparently only possible to avoid by disabling power saving with [RESPONDED] Headphone jack intermittent noise? - #103 by Yibo_Wei or [RESPONDED] Headphone jack intermittent noise? - #154 by Matt_Hartley for example. I was able to test and confirm this “fix” works but haven’t measured how much power is lost by doing so (somebody said ~0.2w so not much). Also if we do this the static hiss is present all the time so not necessarily better if you keep you earphones. Matter of preferrence I suppose, so far I choose not to disable this.

  3. Finally the other problem I’ve had which only started recently and is much more annoying is a weird crackling sound which occurs randomly a few times per second during playback of any audio. This one was not present before, is not reproducible in Ubuntu 22.04 live USB or W11. I can only get it in Ubuntu 23.10 which makes me think it’s likely related to some bug or bad default config in recent versions of pipewire and stuff. But on the other end there’s some weird findings which doesn’t look “software”. As I was not always able to reproduce (or sometimes the problem was much less audible, like just a crack every few seconds) I made a lot tests and found that this was related to CPU load. The lowest the CPU load, the more crackling I would hear, and as soon as the CPU was used the problem would go away. Exactly as in [RESPONDED] Headphone jack intermittent noise? - #54 by Andrew_Marshall. I also noticed this problem is only present on battery and not when plugged-in (so nothing to do with external interferences). @Andrew_Marshall seem to have found a link with power states but I don’t have the same tlp commands on Ubuntu so I can’t reproduce. Just changing from power saving to performance mode on Ubuntu 23.10 does not change anything in my case. I guess I’ll have to try [RESPONDED] Headphone jack intermittent noise? - #117 by foura or [RESPONDED] Headphone jack intermittent noise? - #55 by Andrew_Marshall (haven’t had the motivation yet)

I’m quite surprised and sad to learn though that although problems 1 and 2 are known, there have not been improvement in future revisions of the motherboard :confused: Sure the higher quality audio extension is an option but it also takes up one precious slot, it also costs extra, and there’s already one 3.5mm jack so it would be better if it worked “well” out of the box (including for sensitive headsets). And I’m not expecting audiophile grade quality here, just something at least as good as other laptops / desktop / phones.

I know it’s easy to say but a couple suggestions:

  • Move some of the audio components from the MB to the Audio board ? so that they are further away from interferences and also can be swapped for better ones later ? (as @Charles4 hoped in [RESPONDED] Headphone jack intermittent noise? - #160 by Charles4)
  • Maybe the internal audio board can actually be the same components than in the audio expansion card and interface with the Motherboard using some internal USB ? (re-use existing design, no need for the exansion card in newer models, swappable, etc…)

In my case after spending a lot of time on this already (like I did for other framework issues…) and as #1 is impossible to fix, #2 only with side effects and #3 seems tricky, I’ve decided to give up and use one of my old small (but good quality) USB-C to Jack audio interface that will at least:

  • leave me with the USB-C port free when I’m not using it.
  • not cost me an additional audio expansion card

Though having to rely on more and more workarounds to be able to enjoy my Framework doesn’t make me want to recommend it in it’s current state :confused:, especially to less tech-savvy people (and I really would love to be able to recommend it because I love the concept)

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