Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] So what's your laptop sound like ?
From: Paul Winkler (pw_lists_AT_slinkp.com)
Date: Mon Aug 26 2002 - 18:04:52 EEST
Hi Dave!
On Sun, Aug 25, 2002 at 01:12:04PM -0400, Dave Phillips wrote:
> Greetings:
>
> I'm putting the finishing touches on an article about setting up sound
> on my laptop,
Woohoo! this has been way too much of a black art...
> and it occurred to me that there may be some common models
> that are advisable to new users who particularly want to get decent
> audio from their laptop machines. If any of you have the time to
> respond, I'm curious about the following information:
>
> 1) What laptop do you use (if any, of course) ?
Dell Latitude CPi/A with pentium II 366.
obsolete, thank god. :)
> 2) What audio chipset does it have inside ?
NeoMagic NM256-AV combined audio/video chip.
To be avoided!
> 3) What sound driver(s) do you use ?
Alsa from CVS now that it doesn't hang every other time
I boot, thanks to a lot of work by Takashi.
> 4) Are you using any of the following:
> (A) serial port MIDI interface
> (B) USB audio equipment
> (C) PCMCIA audio card
none of the above.
> 5) Was your experience setting up sound on your laptop:
> (A) Dismal - too much trouble for too little reward
> (B) Dedicated - took a little work but you're happy now
ALSA wasn't too hard to set up, but was extremely buggy
before Takashi and I did a round of exchanging bug reports
and fixes. I had about a 50% chance of hanging the system
just by starting or restarting ALSA.
Now it's down to maybe 10%. Still crappy but useable. :-\
> (C) Delightful - installation & configuration was an easy breeze
OSS-Free was "Delightful": IIRC it was detected during install
and worked fine. Later I switched to Debian and I don't recall
if it did any kind of soundcard probing, or if I had to compile
the kernel with support turned on. In any case, it was no trouble.
> 6) How do you use your laptop audio system, i.e., listening to XMMS,
> composing with realtime output from Pd or Csound, soundfile editing with
> Audacity or Snd, etc. ?
Mostly I've only used the laptop for listening to MP3s and CDs,
but I've also made it all the way through a 1-hour DJ set using
GDAM with no crashes or errors (other than user error).
> 6) Anything else ?
>
> Please feel free to comment as needed, e.g. "Output is good at 16-bits
> but mic/line-in are hardwired to 8-bits"
How'd you know? :)
I don't actually know if that's what it's doing, but
it sure sounds like it. Input is on par with your average
telophone.
The output sounds fine, though sometimes the laptop's power supply
puts a lot of noise into the audio signal. Not always. It might
be a grounding issue, and it can always be fixed by running
off the battery.
>, "Internal speakers are weak
well, yeah, but so what?
--Paul Winkler "Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is made - today!"
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