Raspberry Pi – analog output noise

I got Raspberry Pi 2 as a present from my brother. It’s a nice toy, I was trying out OpenELEC, it makes for a really nice home theater in combination with a NAS on local network. The only drawback was that the analog sound output produced kind of unpleasant noise. I tried to follow a lot of pieces of advice found around on forums, changed the operating system, drivers, nothing helped. It seemed that the noise was a design problem of the analog sound (the digital sound output was all right).

In the end, I installed Raspbian and started using this Pi as a “thin client” to connect to other computers using X2Go remote sessions. It was a nice use case, but I didn’t need it so often as to actually miss sound. Eventually, I was advised to use an external sound card. A small, $10 USB card did the trick. The noise was gone and now, when using Raspberry as a thin client, I’m able to listen to music on it, too.