[CLUE-Tech] Sound Woes

[Nathan Hokanson]

Folks,

I have a Sony Vaio PCG-GRX560 (Laptop), and normally I would post this
question to the sony-linux group, but the problem is not hardware
related, so I thought I would come here for some help.

Recently I got the laptop back from the service department after they
replaced my back-light.  Since part of the "service" is wiping the hard
drive and re-installing the "default" OS (XP Home ... who's idea was
that!!!), I had decided to try out SuSe 9.0.  It had good reviews on the
sony-linux as working pretty much out of the box.  I used to run
Mandrake (and was very satisfied, but wanted to try out a new
distro)....

Long story, I know, but it helps to preface the problem.

When I play music in XMMS with alsa it starts out ok, but then starts to
click every second or so, then the clicks begin to build up and pretty
soon, even though you can hear the music, it is very distorted.

When I turn off alsa and use the OSS plugin music stays clear most of
the time, but distortion creeps in once in a while, but seems to be
corrected quickly.

I know this is not a hardware issue because sound works correctly in XP
Home.

The sound card in the machine is an AC 97 using the Intel i8x0 chipset. 
Here are relevant portions of my /etc/modules.conf:

options snd-intel8x0 snd_ac97_clock=0 snd_enable=1 snd_index=0

# YaST2: sound system dependent part
#
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-slot-1 off
alias sound-service-1-0 off
alias sound-slot-2 off
alias sound-service-2-0 off
alias sound-slot-3 off
alias sound-service-3-0 off
options snd snd_cards_limit=1 snd_major=116


alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-11 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
                                                                                /proc/pci lists the device as:
 Bus  0, device  31, function  5:
    Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio
Controller (rev 2).
      IRQ 9.
      I/O at 0x1c00 [0x1cff].
      I/O at 0x18c0 [0x18ff].

I am really hoping that this is a configuration issue, because I really
don't want to have to recompile my kernel and/or modules because I tend
to mess things up that way...

-- 
Nathan Hokanson