R-Pi 2: Repeated clicking sound on speakers (via 3.5 mm jack)

Question

I'm hoping someone can help. We are using a Raspberry Pi model 2. We bought it and installed Raspbian via NOOBS in February 2015

According to posts I read elsewhere, this means we should have the latest distro which has solved the clicking problem. But we are still getting a clicking.

Specifically: the moment we plug in the speakers (using 3.5 mm audio jack) we hear clicking. This is quite annoying and makes it impossible to really use audio with it. We know this isn't a problem with the speakers as we tested them with an iPhone and they worked fine.

Is this a known problem? Is there a chance we downloaded an old distro? How can we check the version?

Answer 1

First you can get the latest OS here and update it with

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade && sudo shutdown -r now

Second the fix you read about may be the cause of the noise; There was a bug that caused a pop sound when turning the audio chip on or off when people press play/pause. The fix was to leave the audio chip on all the time or fox x seconds.

Plugging speakers into any live audio jacks causes a pop sound, mobile phones get around this by detecting and only enabling the jack when it's fully plugged.

You could turn off the chip before plugging speakers into it but you might still experience the click/pop when you turn it on again. The A/B+ and v2 use a different audio system so it might work.

Or you could turn the volume all the way down on an amp between the pi and the speakers.

If the clicking is continues you may have dirty power like from a square wave inverter (get a pure sine inverter instead or add a cap or use a good voltage regular)

Another option is the hifiberry.