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Whenever audio starts playing, or stops playing, a 'popping' sound can be heard from my headphones. I am running Elementary OS 0.3.2 Freya, and the issue only happens when I am using headphones. The 'popping' also happens when I plug my headphones in and when wifi has connected or disconnected.

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  • Almost 7 years later. Even switching to Pipewire. I still have this issue. And I didn't select puplex nor using LTP (it's on a desktop anyway). I'm using S/PDIF
    – Melroy van den Berg
    Commented May 28, 2022 at 22:40

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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If you happen to be using TLP, this could be caused by TLP's default config turning your audio stuff off when you're not playing audio to save power. I noticed my laptop was doing the same thing while playing audio through my headphone port on battery power. When it was "power saving" I noticed a hissing noise coming from my speakers too.

Try setting the following parameters in /etc/default/tlp to disable audio power saving:

# Enable audio power saving for Intel HDA, AC97 devices (timeout in secs).
# A value of 0 disables, >=1 enables power saving (recommended: 1).
SOUND_POWER_SAVE_ON_AC=0
SOUND_POWER_SAVE_ON_BAT=0

# Disable controller too (HDA only): Y/N.
SOUND_POWER_SAVE_CONTROLLER=N

Then restart the tlp service:

sudo systemctl restart tlp
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    In Ubuntu 22.02 this file is located in /etc/tlp.conf. Edit this or create new config file in /etc/tlp.d/. Remember to restart tlp service afterwards.
    – Draco
    Commented Jul 12, 2022 at 9:11
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The solution for me was changing the profile in PulseAudio from Analog Stereo Duplex profile to Analog Stereo Output.

Install "Pulse Audio Control". This comes in a separate package from Pulse Audio, so don't assume you have it installed.

For Ubuntu:

sudo apt install pavucontrol

In my case it was Centos7:

yum install pavucontrol

Open Pulse Audio Volume Control and go to the Configuration tab.

In the dropdown select Analog Stereo Output instead of Analog Stereo Duplex.

This got rid of the pops completely in my Centos7 with Gnome Shell. It's a quick fix so worth the try rather than playing around with auto-mute, updating ALSA drivers, etc.

Pulse Audio Control dropdown

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  • For me it was issue with tlp. Modifying /etc/tlp.conf as described in other comment fixed the issue.
    – Draco
    Commented Jul 12, 2022 at 9:13
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I started noticing the same thing (a pop when starting audio playback) with my desktop machine's speakers after upgrading from the 4.9 kernel to the 4.19 kernel.

Debian Stretch (ELTS 4.19 backported kernel) using PulseAudio.

As seen here, my solution was to create a file, ~/.config/pulse/default.pa and then to populate same thusly:

.include /etc/pulse/default.pa
.nofail
unload-module module-suspend-on-idle
.fail

Problem went away after the next boot/login...

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    Good solution, thanks! To make this work for all system users, I created a /etc/pulse/default.pa.d/local.pa file. I used only the last three lines of your file. Works perfectly for everyone.
    – Olek Wojnar
    Commented Sep 17, 2022 at 18:02
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I was not using TLP and configuration was fine. In my case PulseAudio was causing the popping/clicking noises on my S/PDIF output. See troubleshooting Arch wiki page on this issue.

That being said. I'm actually using Pipewire with pipewire-pulse together with the Wireplumber. You need to set ["session.suspend-timeout-seconds"] = 0 to disable suspend for ALSA in Pipewire Wireplumber.

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