Comment 21 for bug 479375

Hm, somehow I got rid of the problem.
After playing around with the power_save value in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. I changed it to 60 and the dropouts disappear. However when I temporarily switch back now to a value 10, it is very difficult to reproduce the dropouts. I did otherwise not change anything in the system. Can anybody confirm that? What about you, David Finch?

It seems a bit of a mystery. But I guess it's safe to say, even though my symptoms are somewhat different, that this is related to the power-management setup issues that people had e.g. here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/381201 .
It's also obvious that it's not related to the hardware detection of the codec, as there seems to be no difference between Jaunty and Karmic.

Would you want me to try to dig deeper and find out more about the problem?
Anyway, thanks for your help to self-help, guys. Especially thanks to David Henningsson for pointing me to the latencytop tool.
Regards, Alex