Ubuntu – Distorted audio over headphones in Ubuntu 17.04 dual booted with Windows 10

17.04dual-bootsoundwindows 10

Overview

I have Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 installed along side Windows 10 on my HP Pavilion 15 AU113TX laptop. Sometimes when I switch to Ubuntu from Windows, I get distorted audio from left earphone while listening to anything.

This issue is intermittent as sometimes audio comes out just fine right after I booted to Ubuntu, however it starts causing problems again if I put Ubuntu to sleep and wake it up after couple of hours. On Windows 10, however, audio works perfectly even after reboots from Ubuntu or after waking up from sleep.

Affected Ubuntu Version

While I'm tagging 17.04 with the question, this issue occurred Ubuntu 16.10 as well, I haven't tried 16.04 though, since it originally shipped with Kernel 4.4 which doesn't have very good support for Kaby Lake chipset (which my laptop has).

Tried Solutions

I did go through Ubuntu's Audio Troubleshoot Guide but it didn't fix my problem. There are 3 related questions;

  1. Distorted and Choppy Audio
  2. Choppy and Distorted Audio
  3. How can I fix choppy audio?

Unfortunately, none of those questions mention dual boot scenario and neither the solution they propose fix the problem.

Diagnostic Information

Output for command sudo lshw -c multimedia

    *-usb:1                   
           description: Video
           product: HP Wide Vision HD
           vendor: DFKAR019I333QL
           physical id: 3
           bus info: usb@1:3
           version: 0.04
           capabilities: usb-2.00
           configuration: driver=uvcvideo maxpower=500mA speed=480Mbit/s
    *-multimedia
           description: Audio device
           product: Intel Corporation
           vendor: Intel Corporation
           physical id: 1f.3
           bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.3
           version: 21
           width: 64 bits
           clock: 33MHz
           capabilities: pm msi bus_master cap_list
           configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=32
           resources: irq:135 memory:b4328000-b432bfff memory:b4310000-b431ffff

Any help in fixing this would be appreciated, also let me know if I need to put output for any more commands. Thanks!

Best Answer

I had the same issue. Give this a shot it ended up working for me

sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload
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