Poor sound quality under linux?

[Damien Elmes]

Doug ABERDEEN <douglas.aberdeen at anu.edu.au> writes:

> Hi Guru's
>
> I've noticed that sound quality under my Linux setup is generally 
> poorer than Windows and I'm after some tips to make it sound better.
>
> Symptoms:  Under xmms, mpg123, xine, artsd, games like Tux Racer, I get what 
>            sounds like white noise and high frequency distortion 
>            mixed in with the audio. It's still listenable, but 
>            poor enough to irritate me quickly. I thought it might be 
>            down-sampling somwhere but when I forced mpg123 to 
>            downsample and then it sounded really crap ;) The sound quality 
>            under Windows is as good as I would expect
>            from on m/board audio and much better than the Linux sound.

When I was building an MP3 player for my car last year I encountered a problem
with poor sound quality which seemed to get worse proportional to the volume.
After installing noise filters on the outputs etc and having no luck, I got
grumpy, and it wasn't until a few weeks later when a friend was in the car
that we suddenly realised the laptop had an inbuilt mic that was causing
feedback.

So check for that. :-)

Have you tried both OSS and ALSA? Or is the card only supported by ALSA? Is
the sound output going through some mixing daemon like arts or esd? That's all
I can think of for now I'm afraid. If it works in windows and you've ruled
everything out, it's probably a driver problem. Tried CVS ALSA, or stepping
back some versions?

-- 
Damien Elmes