[linux-audio-user] Distortion -- bad speakers or cheap soundcard?

Several questions, all of which may stem from
quite imperfect understanding.
(Please be gentle to the terminal newbie...)

I have an admittedly consumer-grade sound-card (SB PCI
16) and moderately acceptable speakers with a
under-desk sub-woofer.
My question is this: when synthesizing a MIDI file
from timidity using a soundfont, how do I tell whether
the distortion is permanently in the .wav file, or if
it's just my speakers?

And if it is part of the *.wav file, what adjustments
should I make to eliminate the distortion before
creating a CD? Would I just need to reduce some
levels either with timidity switches, or with
alsamixer?

Here's where my limited understanding of sound
processing and hardware fail me: it seems to me that,
if in rendering a MIDI file through a softsynth such
as timidity, when I specify output directly into a wav
file (e.g. with timidity it would be with the switch
'-Ow' then I ought to be able to get decent digital
output, even if my local speakers couldn't handle it.

I was thinking it would be analogous to rendering a
full color ray-traced image, even if I was using an
ancient video card that couldn't handle more than say,
16 colors. After all, it's the software doing the
processing, isn't it, even if I don't happen to have
hardware that can render in real time?

How is it that the DAC on my soundcard can handle
input from a commercial audio CD, outputting sound
levels at least as high, but w/o distortion?

If you can suggest background to read up on, that
would be useful, too! But nothing too technical,
please, I never took trig or calculus... ;-)
Thanks!
-Mark

                
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Received on Wed Aug 10 20:15:06 2005