[pulseaudio-discuss] Questions about PulseAudio's built-in equalizer sink

[Robert Charlton]

Hello PulseAudio community. I'm using PA's built-in equalizer sink on an 
up-to-date (as of writing) Arch Linux system. I have one question and 
one issue for you guys today. I couldn't get any help elsewhere. 
Information on PA's equalizer is extremely sparse, and PA's wiki seems 
to be down, so I hope you can help me with this.

_Firstly_, I was wondering if there is a way to raise the limit to which 
I can boost the volume of the available frequencies in the equalizer. I 
am using qpaeq, by the way. I used to use the very buggy and outdated 
PulseAudio Equalizer LADSPA sink by our good friend psyke83 
<http://ubuntuforums.org/member.php?u=50843>, but I couldn't seem to get 
it to work at all on my system, so I finally decided to switch to the 
built-in equalizer, as per these instructions 
<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio#Equalizer>. The problem 
is, this equalizer doesn't boost the volume of the frequencies, 
specifically the lower ones, as much as I'd prefer. So is there 
something I can edit to raise the limit on that? Thanks.

_The other issue I have_ is that the equalizer sink has very poor 
"performance" compared to the normal output sink (Analog Output). I 
don't experience problems on some things, such as most flash content and 
native media players, but for video games and sites like Slacker, I get 
choppy audio. The choppiness for video games is intolerable, while 
Slacker, for every other song, seems to produce choppiness, oddly. So, 
let me get to the point. What can I do about the lagginess/choppiness? 
As said before, I only get this while switched to the "FFT based 
equalizer". The relevant values in my /etc/pulse/daemon.conf are as follows:

    default-fragments = 8
    default-fragment-size-msec = 5

I set these values according to this 
<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio#Laggy_sound>. I doubt 
those are correct values for my hardware. I tried to determine the 
correct values as /these/ instructions 
<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio#Setting_the_default_fragment_number_and_buffer_size_in_Pulseaudio>, 
but it proved to be too difficult and confusing to calculate the values. 
To be honest, I doubt the buffer values given by LANG=C timeout 
--foreground -k 10 -s kill 10 pulseaudio -vvvv 2>&1 | grep 
device.buffering -B 10 are correct, given they are ridiculously small 
the output didn't list my actual sound card (only HDMI and my USB mic).


So, what to do about this problem? Thanks for the help.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/attachments/20130226/aabc9dfd/attachment.html>