LinuxMusicians

After a stupid amount of testing, I finally isolated a noise issue on my system!

I can use the built-in laptop mic input and have a pretty clean low-noise signal. But there's a modest amount of white noise present if a do NOT have something plugged into the separate headphone jack!

So, if I plug in just an adapter without headphones even, that does it. No more noise. There's this noticeable though still not terrible noise level if I record into the mic-input without anything in the headphone input. Plug something into headphone jack, and the recording from the mic-input is nice and clean!

WEIRD!

For reference, this is an Acer Aspire One 722 and I'm on KXStudio with the latest 3.8 kernel.

I had some ground-loop issues that I figured out too, but this seems unrelated. I'm not sure anything can help me, just wanted to share my experience in case it's interesting or useful to anyone else.

It says CONEXANT and when I use it in JACK, it's called HDA ATI SB. The computer uses an AMD CPU.

To be clear, the amount of noise is such that I would have thought it just was not high quality. It's functional, just not great. It was noticing the improvement sometimes though and finally sorting out the source being the headphones plugged in or not. I suppose it might be a software / driver issue but I'm not even sure about that.