[Speex-dev] speex-1.2beta1 AEC garbles up audio unless compiled with --enable-fixed-point

[Andras Kadinger]

Greetings everyone,

I was about to compare AEC performance between 1.1.12 and 1.2beta1 when 
I noticed something.

If I configure (and compile) speex-1.1.12 with

./configure --enable-shared=no --enable-static=yes

it compiles and works as expected: I can run a mic and speaker signal 
through testecho, it runs in a reasonable amount of time (about 23 secs 
for 3 minutes of audio) and I get back good audio.

If I configure (and compile) speex-1.2beta1 with

./configure --enable-shared=no --enable-static=yes

it compiles, but with the same input files testecho runs very long (say 
about 21-24 minutes, probably data-dependent), and the output audio is 
garbled up.

It does the same with --enable-sse.

But with --enable-fixed-point, AEC returns to normal.

This is happening on a Gentoo stable (1.12.4) system, gcc 4.1.1, glibc 
2.4, processor is "Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz" (with 
HyperThreading disabled).

My data is real-world audio captured from a physical speaker and mic 
setup in a room, by the left and right channels of the same soundcard 
input, and is sampled at 32 kHz. 1.2beta1 AEC without 
--enable-fixed-point garbles the audio up whether I claim it is sampled 
at 8 kHz or 32 kHz in testecho.c, it just does so differently. I can't 
hear anything of my original audio, instead I hear a very loud 
(full-scale), regularly repeating noise. When I look at the waveform, it 
looks a bit like 1/x for x>0, where overflowed samples values are not 
clipped but wrapped back down; that is, the first few dozen samples are 
wildly swinging between -32768 and 32767, later slow down but still 
full-scale, even later the sample values asymptotically approach zero 
from above; then suddenly the cycle begins again. (I can provide samples 
of input and output on request.)

Is anyone else seeing anything like this?

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,
Andras Kadinger