it has returned! i have been listening with headphones more to understand the subtleties of the problem.
i have noticed some other odd things about the sound. 1. chugging sounds. if no sound should be playing static will begin doing something similar to what that childhood train sound and rhythm chug-chug-chug or maybe pat-pat-pat. it goes and comes and only lasts a couple of seconds. 2. a quiet(ish) static generally occurs when i move a window to the edge of the screen or if it touches the panel. weird! 3. i can't be certain of this but... i think that when the wall of noise (which is really loud) occurs the other music or movie sound still plays undistorted underneath it. potentially the wall of noise is on top of the sound that is playing rather than a distortion of it. but it is really difficult to tell and i can only handle listening to it for so long. 4. the slowing/dropping of pitch doesn't occur nearly as often or as severely --i have no idea why. 5. lowering the pcm volume did seem to affect the problem temporarily but the problem seemed to be able to adapt to it. if i moved pcm to 70% it would be fine for a while but then i would have to move it to 50% to fix the problem and now it seems to have no effect (if it ever did-- maybe it was some sort of placebo effect where i just thought it was better). -- audio playback distortion. https://launchpad.net/bugs/81178 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
