Re: [linux-audio-user] Poor sound quality with some music

From: Martin Kuball <martinkuball@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Thu Mar 23 2006 - 22:06:19 EET

Am Thursday, 23. March 2006 09:13 schrieb james@email-addr-hidden-dot-dat.net:
> On Wed, 22 Mar, 2006 at 09:38PM +0100, Martin Kuball spake thus:
> > Hi!
> >
> > I'm using onboard sound with NVidia CK804 chip with the
> > snd_intel8x0 alsa driver and have the problem that some of my
> > music sounds really bad when played.
> >
> > Let me give an example. I have a cd with a song I like. It sounds
> > good when played directly from the CD via the internal audio
> > connector. Now I rip the song with cdparanoia to a wav file. When
> > I play this file it sounds realy bad. I don't know how to
> > describe it but I think it's some kind of droning. When I play
> > the file using my usb audio device it's sounds fine.
> >
> > To a certain extent I have this bad quality with a lot of my
> > music files. But what I notices is that I have never had this
> > with sound in a video. Now I wonder if this might be some problem
> > with music having (normally) 44100 Hz sample rate and video sound
> > 48000 Hz. Is this possible? Maybe even a known problem?
>
> Sample rate copnversion shouldn't be the problem - the software
> you're playing it with should do all this for you.
>
> What it could be is volumes. Admittedly "droning" doesn't sound
> like a clipping problem, but what you hear as droning, I might
> describe differently.

Well, I'm not a musician or audio specialist. So I'm not really sure
if droning is the right word. But ...
>
> Anyway, fire up alsamixer and start playing with your master and
> PCM volumes. If it doesn't change anything, then at least it's
> another thing off the list of possible causes.

You were totally right. It was a mixer problem. I had the PCM set to
its max value. Lowering it somewhat made the bad sound disappear.
Thank's for the hint. By the way, what stage of the sound processing
does the PCM affect? I guess it's aplied to digital values right
before DA conversion. Am I right?

Martin
Received on Fri Mar 24 00:15:03 2006

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Fri Mar 24 2006 - 00:15:08 EET