Linux Sound Quality Sucks??? [Solved]

pops45042 · Last edited by pops45042 on Wed Dec 08, 2004 10:17 pm; edited 1 time in total

Ok....

I've got an Abit AN7 MB and tried to get OSS up and running but didn;t have any luck. I ended up breaking down and taking my SB Audigy out of another system of mine and put it in. I disabled the MB sound and brought the system up with ALSA on the Audigy.

Sound on my 5.1 on this system in windows sounds phenominal, rich bass and everything the ear could want. But when I boot into Linux and fire up xmms the sound doesn't sound nearly as good. I've got the sound up and running in 5.1 and have played with the equalizer settings and tried other media players like kaffeine, Juk, Kaboodle..... and all of them sound the same quality wise (yeah, could all be frontend apps using the same backend).

Is the overall sound quality in linux just not nearly on par with what windows has to offer or what? From what I've seen on the forums alot of other people have quality issues as well.

Any Ideas o' Gurus of linux??
Paul
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shade266 · Guru Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Internal

first, ensure you compiled the correct oss configs in your kernel.. then following the alsa installation guide

mnxAlpha · Apprentice Joined: 15 Sep 2004 Posts: 210

The Audigy is not well supported under Linux. At least, not compared to most other sound cards.

The other possibility - check the volumes. Do not set them all to 100%, because it will probably sound like crap. Set the PCM and Master volumes to around 70%, and go from there.

Generally, when people have sound quality issues, it's usually one of those, or alternatively a crappy sound card.

tomm1111 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Mar 2004 Posts: 94

Anything else important to you besides music?

pops45042 · Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 3:45 pm Post subject:

shade266: I've got alsa up and running fine, its the sound quality that im getting picky about.

mnxAlpha: I've got the volumes set at about 65% because I noticed what you mentioned, the further you turn up the sound, the worst the quality gets after a certain extent. 65% seemed to be the sweet spot.

tomm1111: Music is mainly what I use my linux boxxx for aside from school work (programming in C++) downloading all sorts of crap and gaming too (UT 2K-2k4, D3, Quake...). It's pretty much become my everything computer.

Are there any sound cards out there that work in 5.1 and actually support linux hardware mixing that sound as good as an Audigy under windows?

Paul
_________________
"That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable"

Laugh at my old system!
AMD Opteron 165@ 2750Mhz, 2gig 400mhz Cas2 Crucial Ballistix, Abit NF8 Ultra MB, WD 80gig (system), WD 120gig (storage), Geforce 8800GTS 320MB, Mushkin 550W PS

vonhelmet · Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 4:11 pm Post subject:

discomfitor · l33t Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 927 Location: None

I have an Audigy 2 ZS and it works phenomenally in linux. I've also got an M-Audio Audiophile (USB) which runs flawlessly as well.

They ARE supported and they WILL run perfectly. It just takes a little tweaking.
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pops45042 · Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 5:27 pm Post subject:

So what types of tweaking would you recommend to help it sound better? Perhaps post configs ....

Paul
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j_c_p · Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 5:39 pm Post subject:

I've got a Terratec Aureon 7.1 which runs great too

(same drivers as M-Audio).

Alsa 1.0.7 of course

.
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iulianpojar · n00b Joined: 17 May 2004 Posts: 38 Location: Moldova

Hey I have to an Audigy and it sounds beter in linux than in windows!
In linux you have more control over you sound card.
The reason why yours sounds bad is your configurations of volumes of outputs.Open a mixer (alsamixer). Shut them all down, then open one by one and you will hear weach chanels realy create the sound and weach geve you garbage in output - shut them down . Keep open only the outputs that you are using ... and the inputs to ... .

pops45042 · Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 8:14 pm Post subject:

Hmmm...... turn down all the volumes that aren;t needed eh? Haven't tried that one yet. I'll give it a go when I get home and post my results back.

Paul
_________________
"That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable"

Laugh at my old system!
AMD Opteron 165@ 2750Mhz, 2gig 400mhz Cas2 Crucial Ballistix, Abit NF8 Ultra MB, WD 80gig (system), WD 120gig (storage), Geforce 8800GTS 320MB, Mushkin 550W PS

discomfitor · l33t Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 927 Location: None

For tweaking, there are loads of different controls available in alsamixer. I've got sliders for bass and treble, 3D sound, surround sound, just about everything I can imagine. If it sounds crackly, just turn down the main PCM (NOT the master) to just under the red (80 for me) and it will sound normal again.
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pops45042 · Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 1:30 am Post subject:

Ok, here's something interesting. I've found out that in xmms I have two equalizers. One is the builtin xmms one that you can bring up by pressing the button by the playlist button. The other is under preferences -> effects plugins tab called "EQ Pligin 0.6 [libeq.so]. This one was marked enabled and it has a gui that you can choose. It was also turned on.

The Equalizer that's built into xmms actually makes the sound worse when I use it, regardless if its the only EQ enabled or not. Turning its preamp setting up merely makes the sound distort and it only gets a tiny bit louder. And If I mess with any of the setting on the EQ they do get louder but the quality of the sound degrades considerably.

Ok, at this point I was trying to rule stuff out so I disabled the plugin EQ and only tweaked with the built-in one. Spent about 10 minutes before being sickend of the quality and convinced this wasn;t the EQ to use.

Then I disabled the built-in EQ and enabled the plugin EQ. I had alsamixer open while I was messing with both EQ's. I noticed that when I clicked it's GUI "ON" button the nice rich sound that I was used to hearing came alive for a few short moments and then quickly faided back. the PCM level on the alsamixer also jumped to 100 when this happened. I left it enabled and cranked the EQ's preamp up a few dB and it didn;t distort, but sounded kinda nice. Similar to the EQ that creative labs has for their Live and Audigy cards. I then just messed with the individual frequencies and finally hit the point where the music and my ears were getting intimate....

!!

That plugin EQ seems to be the secret to my sound problems. Now the sound is back to being rich on my 5.1 and the bass is kickin like it should and the sliders sound alot more like they effect the right frequiencies like they should without distortion (unless you max them out!). The sound quality is right on par with what I was able to tweak out of winXP by fine tuning creative's EQ.

Curiously enough, the Bass and Treble adjustments in the alsamixer have no effect on the sound at all. I can crank them all the way up or down and nothing happens. I thought that maybe xmms bypassed the alsamixer settings, but that theory died shortly after I adjusted the PCM and Master volumes. Any ideas on that one?

All in all thanks to everyone who contributed anything at all, it helped!
Paul
_________________
"That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable"

Laugh at my old system!
AMD Opteron 165@ 2750Mhz, 2gig 400mhz Cas2 Crucial Ballistix, Abit NF8 Ultra MB, WD 80gig (system), WD 120gig (storage), Geforce 8800GTS 320MB, Mushkin 550W PS

discomfitor · l33t Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 927 Location: None

If the alsamixer controls for bass/treble aren't working, it's because the tone slider is muted.
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There is no substitute for experience.
Imperfection indicates a lack of effort.

pops45042 · Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 3:07 am Post subject:

Darckness, I think I love you man! I wouldn't have guessed that at all. I did notice that there are several sliders labeled emu10k1 with various item desc. Looks like I'll be digging down further into alsa docs to see what all these mean.

Thanks again for answers to questions I'd otherwise still be wondering!
Paul

....unmute "tone" and bass and treble come to life...makes sense why bass and treble can;t be muted while tone can be, but it has no "volume".... wonder why they implimented tone like that .... I need something to ponder at night.
_________________
"That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable"

Laugh at my old system!
AMD Opteron 165@ 2750Mhz, 2gig 400mhz Cas2 Crucial Ballistix, Abit NF8 Ultra MB, WD 80gig (system), WD 120gig (storage), Geforce 8800GTS 320MB, Mushkin 550W PS

Lokheed · Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 5:02 am Post subject:

I used to have aweful sound through my SB Live. It crackled, no bass, just sounded like crap.

I was advised to turn down the PCM volume and use the Master instead. It worked perfectly.

I set my PCM to 14 (around 40%) and my Master to 60 (100%)...my sound is just as clear and crisp has Windows, with enough bass to thump through my walls.

discomfitor · l33t Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 927 Location: None

Glad everything worked out for you.
_________________
There is no substitute for experience.
Imperfection indicates a lack of effort.

Kayl · n00b Joined: 05 Dec 2004 Posts: 9

I was testing an reading the postings same time, playing music, sounded like crap, and

e2k · n00b Joined: 30 Jul 2004 Posts: 44

placeholder · Advocate Joined: 07 Feb 2004 Posts: 2500

This has inspired me to make an ALSA howto on my website.

babakhaan · n00b Joined: 20 Jun 2004 Posts: 3

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

the only bad thing though is under linux you can't do those wonderful eax effects

eean · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 6:18 am Post subject:

Right now one of the less user-friendly features of sound on Linux are the ALSA default settings for the mixer. I mean, its mute by default (at least, last time I was on default it was). Can hardly get worse then that.

I have a SB Live sound card... pretty standard, you'd think someone who actually knew what the heck all those sliders are would take the time to set them correctly.
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lamaistres · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 6:57 am Post subject:

Epyon · l33t Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 754 Location: NJ, USA

I have a sb audigy 2 value card that sounds fine in Linux without any tweaking. The only thing I had to do was patch asla-driver to support the card.

My volume is set around 87% for everything and it sounds fine. Maybe I'm just used to the god awful output on my old santa cruz in linux.