[ILUG] sound under linux

[Kae Verens]

Stephen Shirley wrote:
> Hey,
> 	Something about sound under linux has been bothering me for a while:
> if you turn up the volume to reasonable volumes in the mixer, the sound
> sounds 'forced' - i.e. it breaks up - like you were playing it far too
> loud thru bad speakers. This happens both with my sblive at home, and
> the i810 chip here in work. Both of them sounds just fine undre windows
> at similar or higher volumes, so it's not a problem with the speakers or
> sound card. I'm guessing it's to do with the drivers. has anyone else
> noticed this? I'm using OSS drivers, on debian 3.0. Would switching to
> alsa improve matters?

sounds like you're preamping it too high before it goes to the speakers.

if you have some sort of graphical equalizer, you can tune the sound to 
be correct. Play a "loud" sound while tuning teh volumes of your 
equalizer (not the speakers), and keep tweaking until the volume never 
hits the maximum.

The "forced" sound is usually caused by the amplitude of the wave being 
cut off as it reaches the limit forced on it by the hardware. By 
reducing the strength of the amplitude, you're reducing the chance that 
it'll hit it's limit.

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