[pulseaudio-discuss] Hardware support, resampling, bit-for-bit

[Arun Raghavan]

On Sat, 2011-10-08 at 01:02 +0200, CC wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 12:19 AM, Jan Steffens <jan.steffens at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>         
>         On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 11:02 PM, CC <ccomren at gmail.com> wrote:
>         > Hello,
>         > I'm new to PulseAudio and couldn't find the following
>         online:
>         > Can PulseAudio take advantage of advanced sound cards, e.g.,
>         mixing and
>         > resampling?
>         > Does it allow for bit-for-bit playback?
>         > I'm building an media pc, but might have wrong ideas about
>         the requirements
>         > -- I do lite the highest possible audio quality. I assume
>         resampling will
>         > slightly reduce audio quality (which I guess is why Windows
>         allows
>         > bit-for-bit playback) and also burns a few CPU cycles.
>         > CC

I'm curious -- do you notice a perceivable difference between the two?

>         No and no. PulseAudio does not support hardware mixing and
>         will
>         resample all incoming streams to the default sample rate and
>         format of
>         the sink (by default 44.1kHz 16bit).
> 
> 
> How are other people setting up Linux for audio and video playback?

Pierre-Louis Bossart has a bunch of patches that should land in the next
major release that lets you dynamically switch sample rates on your
device (with some caveats). This should handle most cases that you care
about.

-- Arun