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FatherBusa
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 21 Mar 2004
Posts: 133
Location: Lincoln, NE
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 Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 2:14 am Post subject: Is it me, or does Intel's hda controller suck? |
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I recently acquired a high-end laptop (Clevo D900t), which is about the coolest box I've ever used. I was particularly excited about Intel's new high definition audio controller -- an onboard 5.1 sound chip.
Now, I didn't expect it to sound like a $1000 sound card. I did, however, fully expect it to sound better than the i810 chip on my old Dell Latitude C640. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it doesn't sound anywhere near as good.
I'm running ALSA with the hda-intel module, and it works fine in that it successfully plays music (or whatever). But the quality of the sound is poor, and I get weird pops and clicks in some applications.
Is anyone happy with the sound from this chip? Am I setting things in alsamixer incorrectly? I'm not running it through a 5.1 system, but shouldn't this chip work find with stereo? Most importantly, shouldn't it sound better than i810?
Just wonderin'
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 27780
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 10:11 am Post subject: |
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FatherBusa,
Very few people could hear the difference between an i810 and the new chip except with monitor speakers under very special listening conditions with CD or better quality music.
Neither chip should give clicks, pops etc.
Add no-hlt to the end of your kernel line in grub.conf. That may improve things at the expense of battery life, since it stops the CPU entering the halt state, which is a cause of sould chip noise on many motherboards.
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NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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FatherBusa
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 21 Mar 2004
Posts: 133
Location: Lincoln, NE
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| Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 9:53 pm Post subject: |
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| NeddySeagoon wrote: | FatherBusa,
Very few people could hear the difference between an i810 and the new chip except with monitor speakers under very special listening conditions with CD or better quality music.
Neither chip should give clicks, pops etc. |
Well, you give me hope!
I'm definitely not an expert, but I can put the laptops side-by-side playing the same thing, and plug the speakers back and forth between the units. The i810 chips sounds better than one would expect from a stock, on-board chip. The hda chip sounds worse than one would expect.
Pops and clicks aren't really the problem, as I see it. I get a persistent clicking sound in ogle and I get some distortion from aplay (when playing an ordinary wav), but I don't use those very often. The most important sound app for me (xmms) works fine -- except that it doesn't. The sound is not very good, and I'm having trouble describing it. Part of it is that the various parts of the song seem mixed wrong (not enough midrange, too much high, that sort of thing -- it varies). It also occassionally sounds like a streaming player sounds when it's losing packets. I get a kind of mild distortion that doesn't rise to the level of noise, but definitely doesn't sound very good.
| NeddySeagoon wrote: |
Add no-hlt to the end of your kernel line in grub.conf. That may improve things at the expense of battery life, since it stops the CPU entering the halt state, which is a cause of sould chip noise on many motherboards. |
Alas, that didn't seem to make any difference.
Thanks for the reply.
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