Sound comes out distorted when running certain games or other CPU intensive stuff

General system Newbie
1

Hello!
Recently my sound has come out completely distorted when my CPU usage gets high, but not consistenly. I first noticed this two weeks ago when I was playing Bloons TD6. After a while my sound comes out like this , regardless of it being on laptop speakers or on headphones. This happened again yesterday on a different game, and also while chatting on discord.

I have never had any issue like this before, be it in the same games and programs or when compiling packages which brought CPU usage up to 100%. I also have no idea how to troubleshoot this. I have not touched the pipewire packages, and the only change I’ve done that is sound related is changing Audacity’s default input to be on JACK. I cannot imagine this being relevant for this issue, as it (1) shouldn’t be and (2) it’s a very long time since I did so.

Usually I’d reinstall at this point, but after a forum post yesterday where someone mentioned it might make it so that this issue isn’t patched I decided to create another post about this. If this doesn’t get solved, I might be left with no ofter choice than reinstalled as I’m a composer.

I’m running EndeavourOS’s i3 flavour.

Software information

Kernel: 6.4.3-arch1-1

Alsamixer
Card: PipeWire
Chip PipeWire

[runarcn@endeavour ~]$ pacman -Q | grep pipewire
gst-plugin-pipewire 1:0.3.74-1
kpipewire 5.27.6-1
libpipewire 1:0.3.74-1
pipewire 1:0.3.74-1
pipewire-alsa 1:0.3.74-1
pipewire-audio 1:0.3.74-1
pipewire-jack 1:0.3.74-1
pipewire-pulse 1:0.3.74-1

[runarcn@endeavour ~]$ lspci -v | grep -i audio
00:1f.3 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Technology Audio Controller (rev 20)
	Subsystem: Lenovo Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Technology Audio Controller
	Kernel driver in use: sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl

[runarcn@endeavour ~]$  cat /proc/asound/version
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version k6.4.3-arch1-1.

Hardware information

CPU: 11th Gen Intel i3-1115G4 (4) $ 4.100GHz
GPU: Intel Tiger Lake-LP GT2 [UHD Graphics G4]

[runarcn@endeavour ~]$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [sofhdadsp      ]: sof-hda-dsp - sof-hda-dsp
                      LENOVO-20X2S0DL00-ThinkPadL14Gen2
2

Does the problem appear on liveusb as well? If not, you could compare package versions & configs from it and see if you find any possible causes.

I’m a lot more experiences in PulseAudio than Pipewire, so sadly cannot give any solid pointers on this.
I know I’ve heard exactly the same audio problem as in your audio clip, but I just cant remember what the fix was for it and was it in pipewire or pulseaudio.

Found issue reported year ago, possible fixes downgrading pipewire and/or changing sampling rate in settings.
Arch wiki on pipewire also had same suggestion about sample rates in #5.1.15 Audio is distorted.

For professional audio Arch forums had thread with issue being missing PAM limits

3

Did you put your system into suspend before you launch the game? This might have something to do with a bug in rtkit where rtkit lowers the priority of realtime threads after supension.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Missing_realtime_priority/crackling_under_load_after_suspend

4

Try using a different kernel. In my experience, zen and tkg-pds are better. tkg-bmq is by far the best if you have ridiculous load, but (so I was told) it’s primarily made for older games. In any way, I was able to play Overwatch without problems while compiling the Linux kernel. And I really mean that I couldn’t notice that my CPU was at 100%. Frame rate, input lag, etc., everything was normal (200FPS locked, without any drops). I thought that was really impressive.