[pulseaudio-discuss] Awful Quality in Sound

[Richi Plana]

On Tue, 2007-12-18 at 08:19 -0700, Richi Plana wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I recently purchased an HP Pavilion dv2622ca laptop and installed Fedora
> 8 on it. I then proceeded to upgrade PulseAudio to 0.9.8 from rawhide.
> When I play audio files on it, the sound is horrible. One way to
> describe it is as if I were playing the audio through a tiny set of
> speakers.
> 
> At first I thought it was just the tiny Altec Lansing speakers on the
> notebook, but when I listened to it on a set if hi-def headphones, the
> quality was still poor.
> 
> I tried playing it through a set of low distortion, high current amp and
> a good set of hidef speakers, and the sound quality was still horrible.
> 
> I tried experimenting a bit, playing sounds at different sample rates
> (44100 and 48000) using mplayer, to no avail.
> 
> Is there any way to test what is causing this and if it is PulseAudio?
> Is there a simple way to override PA and play audio via ALSA
> snd-hda-intel drivers?

Alright, it MAY not be PA. I tried playing music from a virtual console
using oss as the output device and it still sounded horrible.

One thing I did discover, however, was that when I turned up the Master
volume setting and minimized the PCM volume setting, the audio quality
improved tremendously. There seems to be some kind of attenuation going
on when PCM controls are used. Why that is, I've no idea.
--

Richi Plana