Audio from a Lenovo laptop

[on2ron]

I have a small ThinkPad Yoga 12 laptop that I use in my bedroom with SDRconsole with a signal coming from 2 sdr's that are running on the SDRconsole server in the shack. This laptop has an Intel i5 4th gen and is fast enough for this job.

The problem is that its Conexant audio chip has always had problems with W10. The audio is constantly plopping and no longer to enjoy. After some research I found some issues that Microsoft has with these chips and on the release from May 2020 were still not resolved. I run the 1909 version of W10 home edition. Now it has become so bad that it's a pain on the ears. Have removed the audio drivers and installed the one from the Lenovo website but still the problem persists.

One time I plugged in a USB sound card and the result is the same. Seems the on-board Conexant sound chip might not be @ the source of the problem.

There no other of my pc's has this problem, so my guess is that the Console is OK.

Any ideas?

73' Ron
ON2RON

[Simon G4ELI]

Bluetooth Anker

[PD3LK]

https://www.jdhodges.com/blog/fix-audio ... -thinkpad/
Just a guess Ron

[Simon G4ELI]

Ron,

Have you downloaded drivers from Conexant's website, for example this page?

[on2ron]

Thanks for the offered solutions.

I have the Anker Soundcore2 Bluetooth speaker in use for 2 years now and am very pleased with its performance, but I have to use in-ear buds in the bedroom to not disturb my wife.

Leon, I will try this info from your link and see what happens.

Simon, I used a driver that is advised from the Lenovo website that is recommended and provided by them after their update search on my machine. I will look at the ones on this website and check for a good result. It's a bit of a shame as it is a fine machine.

I will come back with the results.

73' Ron

[Simon G4ELI]

Try the USB soundcard and disable the Conexant in the device manager to be sure, then reboot.

[on2ron]

Tried the audio driver update from Microsoft link, but no luck. After this I rebooted and connected the Bluetooth Anker Soundcore2 speaker but this had the same problem. So my guess is that it must be pc related. When starting the Console the low CPU load from 1.3% started to incline to 13.7% and so was the audio latency from a 26ms to 427ms and fluctuating between 350 and 400+ for the rest of the time. This is the latest build v3.0.26 both on the server and the laptop. Choosing a smaller sample rate lake 50 kHz did not make a difference.

Maybe I forgot to mention that this laptop is always using a Wi-Fi connection on the server. I tested another laptop with the same Wi-Fi router and identical settings which did not show any problem, even on the 500 kHz sample rate of the RSPduo. So this problem does not show on any of the other pc's.

Here is the logfile and a screenshot.

73' Ron

[Simon G4ELI]

Odd,

I'm not seeing many errors when I use Google.

[on2ron]

Problem bypassed. I plugged in an ultra cheap external USB sound card and disabled the Conexant on board audio device.
Strange as I had tested this scenario before without success. Maybe I forgot to disable the onboard audio that time.

Sadly the audio produced is very poor and produces a lot of digital artefacts besides almost no low spectrum fidelity. Time to shop for a better one.

Also, the CPU load and audio latency are back to normal and does not increase as it did before. Strange things

73' Ron
ON2RON