Via SPDIF hearable sound starts late, e. g. in the Test Sound dialog I maximally can hear "Left" when the voice should say "Front Left".

When I have pavucontrol open (in the background) whilst clicking on the Test Sound it starts immediately.

Generally, starting any audio/media file, the beginning is not output/hearable. Connecting either optical or coaxial. This only seems to affect Ubuntu 12.10, wasn't the case in 12.04, doesn't seem to be the case in 13.04!

From ubuntuusers.de a bit of help -- playing a non hearable sinus to keep spdif alive:

apt-get install sox

play -n -c2 synth sin gain -100   # -c2 for two channels

Hardware on an ASRock 970 Extreme3 (and GeForce 210):

$ cat /proc/asound/cards

 0 [SB             ]: HDA-Intel - HDA ATI SB

                      HDA ATI SB at 0xfe200000 irq 16

 1 [NVidia         ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia

                      HDA NVidia at 0xfe080000 irq 25



$ cat /proc/asound/card0/codec* | grep Codec

Codec: Realtek ALC892

Some pulseaudio -v output pasted to http://paste.ubuntu.com/5629082/

Can I upgrade from pulseaudio 2.1 somehow?

Live Ubuntu 13.04 output pasted to http://paste.ubuntu.com/5630475/ -- actually here only the very first invocation of sound (or after some long user pause?) starts delayed, ie after "... Left", "Front Right" is heard whereas in 12.10 it's always "... Left", " ... Right".