snd_hda woes on AMD64-based Acer Aspire laptop (6.2-RELEASE)

[Andrew]

Hi all,

This is a call for help... I'm experiencing audio problems on my
laptop: when I try to play audio in KDE, the output is very noisy and
harsh, sometimes briefly stuttering like a skipping CD.

I've tried the 'cdcontrol -f /dev/acd0 play 1' test from the VGA
console (as described in the FreeBSD handbook) but no sound is emitted
in that case. No amount of knobbing and tuning seems to affect the
results.

My laptop is an Acer Aspire 5101AWLMi (ATI SB450 soundcard) with the
very latest BIOS, on which I've installed FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE for
i386, plus the binary kernel objects from Ariff Abdullah's site
(sndkld_releng6_i386_lowlatency.tar.gz).

My dmesg (with uname, etc.) is available at:

<http://arem.altervista.org/tmp/snd_hda_dmesg.txt>


Any help or advice is welcome!

Thanks for your time,
Andrew