I recently noticed some annoying static and hissing sounds coming from my speakers when the system was idle. It would stop when audio was playing, but come right back after. After some digging, I found the culprit — Debian’s aggressive power saving on the audio card.
The Symptom #
You have speakers or headphones connected to your Debian machine (headless or not), and when the system is idle, you hear a low static or hissing sound. As soon as something plays audio, it goes quiet, then comes back a few seconds after the audio stops.
The Fix #
Open a terminal and check the current power save value:
cat /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save
If it returns something like 10 (or any number greater than 0), that’s your problem. The audio card is going to sleep after that many seconds of inactivity, and the wake-up process causes that static/hiss.
To fix it immediately (no reboot needed):
echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save
To make it permanent across reboots:
echo "options snd_hda_intel power_save=0" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/audio_disable_powersave.conf
Verify the change:
cat /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save
Should now return 0.
What If That Doesn’t Work? #
If you’re using PulseAudio, it has its own suspend-on-idle behavior. Try disabling that:
sudo nano /etc/pulse/default.pa
Find this line:
load-module module-suspend-on-idle
And comment it out:
# load-module module-suspend-on-idle
Then restart PulseAudio:
pulseaudio -k
Or if you’re on PipeWire (newer Debian versions), check its status:
systemctl --user status pipewire
That’s it. One setting, and the hiss is gone. Happy listening!