Opened 5 years ago
Closed 5 years ago
#18885 closed defect (fixed)
choppy and distorted USB audio
| Reported by: | catchy_nickname | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Component: | USB | Version: | VirtualBox 6.0.10 |
| Keywords: | audio lync headset | Cc: | |
| Guest type: | Windows | Host type: | Linux |
Description
VirtualBox is a thing of beauty, but audio via a USB audio headset in the Windows 10 guest is just painful. Audio is slow, choppy and unintelligible.
Host is a 10 core workstation with 128 Gbyte of memory, so it's not the limiting factor. Guest is allocated 4 cores and 8 Gbyte. USB audio device, which is passed through to the guest using the USB filter, is a Plantronics "blackwire" communications headset and Windows detects it as a standard USB duplex audio device.
The following were tried with no success:
- Allocating more cores and memory to guest.
- Running VirtualBox with higher priority on host.
- Different audio bitrates and depths in Windows. (Symptoms improve with higher bitrates, but still bad.)
- Disabling Windows DSP effects for the device.
- Disabling 2D and 3D acceleration for the VM.
- All three USB controller options (OHCI, EHCI, xHCI).
- Both chipset options (PIIX3 and ICH9).
- Various combinations of processor virtualization settings in the host BIOS.
- Various combinations of virtualization and paravirtualization settings in VirtualBox.
A suggested workaround was to not pass the USB device through to the guest but instead just let the guest use the default audio device ("PC speakers and microphone" in Windows), which produces an audio stream in the host that can be routed to the USB headset using Pavucontrol. This always results in a hard crash after several minutes, which is a bug that other users are currently reporting:
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=91458 https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=94305
For this symptom, various things were tried with no success:
- PulseAudio vs. ALSA.
- VirtualBox test build 6.0.11.
Change History (2)
comment:1 by , 5 years ago
comment:2 by , 5 years ago
| Resolution: | → fixed |
|---|---|
| Status: | new → closed |
Hallelujah! I started up Lync in the Windows 10 guest this morning and audio was perfect. The only change I made was to switch back to the xHCI USB controller to give it one more try. I did try this before but the audio was quite bad. I guess it must have been caused by Lync itself and/or network congestion problems instead of VirtualBox. To be clear, the OHCI and EHCI USB controllers still cause audio to be absolutely terrible, but I guess there's no need to use these older versions.
Bottom line: xHCI USB controller does seem to provide great audio quality. Recommend closing ticket. Thanks.