Mild sound distortion with FreeBSD 5.3-BETA7

[Travis Poppe]

Hello,

I've recently noticed a mild sound distortion in XMMS and other
applications that output sound. I'm not sure when I started noticing
this, but I don't believe it has always been present in the 5.x branch
(and if it has, I haven't noticed it up until a month or two ago).

The distortion can be described as a "slow motion" sound and lasts less
than a second and appears to be somewhat random. A similar but much more
severe distortion can be heard when there is intense harddrive activity
(such as extracting firefox's source from bz2) that lags any sound
playing to the point that it can be easily heard for up to a minute at a
time (depending on how long it takes to extract the archive).

Not only have I experienced this on my own FreeBSD system, but a few
others as well (with different sound devices/drivers).

I've got an SB Live! 5.1 

FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
Installed devices:
pcm0: <Creative EMU10K1> at io 0xe000 irq 5  (4p/2r/0v channels duplex
default)

Running FreeBSD 5.3-BETA7.

The sound is built into the kernel, but this does not seem to matter.
The distortion also occured when I had the sound loaded as a module.

Any chance of this being investigated/fixed in the near future?

Thanks,

-Travis Poppe