Fixed: Static noise from speakers

I suspect a dying power supply but wanted to make sure. My headless debian dockstar has started playing static through the speakers (attached to a USB sound card). It also plays static whenever I do any activity on the remote ssh console. Say dmesg or even ls. I also nsoticed that it does make a sound when I am running top and the programs swap places in the display.

Tasks:  55 total,   1 running,  54 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.3 us,  0.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.3 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st

Looks like any I/O activity triggers it.

Has anybody else experienced this? How do I debug this? Any suggestions? Other than replacing the power supply ;-)
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UPDATE:
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Not sure what fixed it. I shutdown the unit, disconnected all the connections (including the power supply from the wall) and re-connected everything back. The noise went away.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2015 11:28AM by metric.

cant say for suer in your case - but a while back i used a very cheap pair of usb powered speakers and they hissed for fun when attached to a cheap power brick. could be the smoothing on the powersupply on its way out.

@metric - I concur with Gravelrash, sounds like a power issue of some description. Properly earthed power supplies are best, but often that's not an option ...

Cheers

Don Charisma ... because anything is possible with Charisma

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