As always when blaming someone it turns out this has absolutely nothing to do with the supposed culprit. Apparently, my lower-end Dell notebook has a singing capacitor, which gets induced by the jack daemon calling an interrupt, as indicated by the frequency of the noise problem correlating to the jack buffer size. Interestingly, the noise is not audible when the system is under some load. My current approach is to find a load generator that will place a little load on the system to make the hum go away while still leaving some room for softsynths. The next best approach is replacing the darn thing. Of course, a kernel based fix would be, how should I say, shmoozy. Carlo
