The sound quality (when I play music) in my Linux isn't so good. Do you know when in Winamp in Windows when you set all the sliders of the equaliser to the highest setting? Then it sounds very bad with a lot of noise. In my Linux, the bass sounds a bit noisy like that. But that's not all, some tones, especially higher ones, sound a bit strange as if they're deformed by something. There's a lot of different things that control the sound in Linux. I don't know extremely much about it, but so far I found that the sound gets controlled by the KDE Volume control, by dsp and/or arts, and by alsa. It's as if the audio is going through 3 or 4 equalizers (if I include the one of xmms), because all of those allow you to control bass and treble volumes, so it's no surprise that it sounds bad... Is there any of those where I can tweak the settings so that the sound quality will be better and more pure? It certainly isn't my sound card, because in Windows everything sounds normal and better. EDIT: it sounds as if it's badly amplified, if I lower a few volumes of alsamixer and make my speakers louder instead it seems as if it sounds a bit better. So in ALSA, does "100%" mean it's actually amplifying? [Edited by - Lode on July 16, 2005 4:49:17 AM]

Lower one of the volume bars (heck, set it to 0), can't remember which one, but I think it's labeled AC97. Try lowering them to 0 one at a time and see if it helps.

I read about this somewhere a long time ago. I can't remember the reason, but the sound will be bad if you have everything on 100% in alsamixer. Just set all values to 98% or something, and everything will be good.

First, it really depends on what sound card you have. Some chipsets just have really crappy Linux drivers and it's not hard to see why.

That aside, you want to make sure PCM in your mixer settings is below 75%. Once you go over that, it starts to distort the sound. There should be no problems taking the other settings to 100%. PCM is the one that will screw up your sound.

I suggest setting PCM to around 60% and just using the Master setting for volume control.

Good luck.

Go into the system settings, I use the KDE control center, and try changinf the sound options to AlSA(Advanced Linux Sound Arcatechure). Then you need to open up you media players options(I use xmms) and change that to ALSA. THEN, to fix the bass problem, set your media players volume(i use xmms.. again) to about %80, you always have speaker volume or system volume you can turn up to make up for that. Tell me how it works out!

Setting sliders in ALSA to less than 100% greatly improved the sound quality, thanks.

Quote: Original post by Lode
Setting sliders in ALSA to less than 100% greatly improved the sound quality, thanks.

[smile] No problem!