Maestro 2 (ES 1968) laptop sound sucks

[Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au]

Hello all,

I set have up sound on a HP laptop that has an Maestro 2 (ES1968)
sound card, using the kernel Maestro2 module (aka, not a OSS one)
in 2.4.16.

While it works, it doesn't sound very good, very low volume and
a lot of noise. (dump a .au file to /dev/audio, and playing MP3s
using mpg123 as set up by Debian)

I have done some prelimnary trawling of the 'net and found a few
mentions of poor sound quality from this chipset, but no firm
suggestions on how to fix it.

Any suggestsions?

Antti