I have everything working on this laptop but when I started to listen to music on this computer for the first time I was dissapointed. The sound was crackling and didn't sound good. My dev and ven is correct in Appleac97intelich kext. Have tried a couple of different ones with the same result.

Went into apps > utilities > midi and changed to 48KHz but the same result.. It's ok when I mute the channel that sounds bad but after a reboot the channel setting is reverted to 2channel and I need to enter the application again and mute it.

Soundmax ICH6 AC97 <string>0x266e8086</string>

I really need this to work... if I could make OS X to remember my sound settings it would be awsome... good mono sound is better than bad stereo sound.

found this by running dmesg:

AppleAC97CodecAD198x: 2-to-4 channel spreading enabled

this seems weird...

Are you talking about ThinkPad T43?

My speakers work straight after the installation. I'm running 10.4.6 on it currently.

Yes I'm talking about the Thinkpad T43. Running 10.4.8 kernel 8.8.1.

Installed win xp and guess what? The sound is the same there .... so I'll swap this T43 as soon as I can.

Tested with headphones and then the sound works perfect so its something with the built in speakers.