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

On Thu, 23 Mar, 2006 at 09:06PM +0100, Martin Kuball spake thus:
> 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?

I *think* so. I'm not an expert, so it might be a little more complex
than that.

This is why I don't like XMMS monkeying with it when I change the
volume - everything goes up and down with it.

James
 
> Martin
>

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