I switched motherboards and my audio quality in Linux jumped 1000 fold

[magomago]

As some of you know, over 2 years i've been complaining of the sub part audio I got from my Nforce2 board. It was very ugly compared to Windows. It sounded bad, it had many problems. Nothingman had recocmended me to try to contact the ALSA group and asked if it could be fixed, but obviously I would be testing what they gave. I tried to do that at a point, but got bogged in by school.

About 1.5 weeks ago I took advantage of Newegg deal~ 3400+ S754 + free mobo (the biostar one. I personally didn't care about via vs nfroce chipsets...but the biostare board had room for my big typhoon😉) for 99 dollars. Making the switch, only today I really sat down. I loaded up some songs without thinking twice and all the sudden I noticed how much BETTER it sounded.
The difference is actually incredible. Instead of white noise often, and crackling that occurs ALL day long...everything is smooth.
IIRSC I'm just using the generic onboard sound...but it made me wonder if the onbaord sound is better supported..

Either way i'm suprised, and goes to show how much of a difference drivers make! So as long as I was using the generic i810 codec on my soundstorm, it would sound horrible...whereas now its smooth!

 

[ForumMaster]

perhaps you had some problems as overall, the audio on nforce 2 (sound storm) was considered very good. i have an nForce 2 mobo and the onboard sound is absolutly fine.

 

[kamper]

Good to, um, hear 😛

Perhaps you'd consider donating your old motherboard to ALSA people so that they can test with it themselves (if you don't already have another plan for it)?

 

[Brazen]

ForumMaster, did you install any drivers, or just use the default ones that linux slammed in there? It could also have been a problem with magomago's distrobution... What distros are you guys using?

 

[magomago]

Kamper - I accidently ripped off some of the traces....don't ask how :x. If my friend upgrades though I'll try to persuade hm to donate his motherboard.


Brazen: I was using Ubuntu....but this ugliness in sound was apparant even 4 years back when I was using Redhat 8.0 all the way through the Fedora Core 3.

Forummaster: I believed the same thing, till my friends told me the music sounded like Shi|t. Then I booted to Windows to try it itunes at the time, and it was a huuuge difference. But I was too lazy to use Windows and went back to Linux 😉
What speakers do you have?

While I don't have the greatest speakers out there, i did pay (for me atleast...) a pretty penny for my Monsoon MH505s.

 

[drag]

Personally I run two audio cards in Linux right now.

One is the onboard 'Intel-HD' or the 'high definition sound', which is a stupid name for a onboard sound card.

The other one is a M-Audio Audiophile 24/96, which is a nice if a bit older pro-sumer style audio card. (has digital-out AND in, as well as multiple analog inputs and outputs and I think monitoring mode as well as round-plug-style midi input)

Now I like the audiophile, but it only takes specific sound formats (not talking about mp3 or anything like that) and it doesn't support mmap style access needed for games like Quake3 and such. So it's not to hot for gaming, but it's pretty nice for playing around with making sounds and such.

For 'computer' speakers I have two sets.. One is a 'table top' style AiWA system that I've had for probably 14 years now. One of those el-cheapo things for teenager's bedrooms.

The second one is a low-end 'Home Theater' sony setup. One of those things you can go to K-mart and get for 300 bucks. Comes with small-style sattalite speakers does Ac3, Dobly surround sound, and all that different stuff. Got it because of the coax spdif input.

I like to play games with the output on the Aiwa system while listenning to music on the sony receiver.

From my personal experiance the Digital Analog converters in the cheap Sony 'home theater' receiver is noticably better then even my Audiophile card.

So if you want best sound quality possible I figure the best way to go is with a all-digital pathway from your cdrom (or lossless ripped format like Flac) out of your computer via spdif and into a digital receiver. And then from that to a good set of speakers or headphones.

And you don't even need expensive headphones. There are specific brands (not popular things like Sony or Boise) in the 75-100 dollar range that are as good as any 200-400 dollar set of headphones. Get something big and fluffy and not earbuds. Simply by doing the D-A conversion on a seperate device outside of your computer would be more then enough to make up the difference the way I figure it.

Of course the bad thing about headphones is that their bad for your ears after a while.

 

[Cerb]

External sound card FTW (separate set-top box as a DAC is kind of overkill, but I won't deny SQ gains from doing so). I've rare had acceptable onboard sound. In fact, only once (Shuttle AK35GT2, actaully). Now, my crappy USB one (Philips Aurilium) works in Linux better than it does Windows! No SQ difference I can tell, but never skips, and doesn't randomly hog the CPU for seconds at a time. It's especially awesome since I originally bought it thinking I was going to use it to try external audio, then get something more expensive and Linux-friendly 🙂.

Computers as sources are OK, but even good ones still carry convinience as the primary feature, not complete superiority, even over some $40 DVD players.

 

[drag]

My computer IS my entertainment center. I don't even use my television much anymore. (use Mythtv as desktop applicaiton for watching and recording shows)

The cheap Sony home theater setup seemed like a much better deal to me then your average 'computer speakers' which I've always disliked quite a bit. I wanted surround sound for movies and it was on sale so I got it. Finding out that the DAC on the receiver was much better then what was on my sound card was just a happy coincidance. 🙂

Of course it doesn't look pretty with the center channel duck tape'd to the top of my monitor though. 😛

I am thinking now that if you have a onboard sound card that supports digital out/digital passthrough in addition to a simple home-theater-style receiver that supports spdif in it would be a better way to get good sound on a lower budget then going with a nice sound card and a nice set of computer speakers.

External USB sound cards seem ok, I'd like to get a decent one for my laptop (I'll keep yours in mind), but the latency of them kinda turn me off as I like to play around with making noises and such every once and a while.


edit:

With modern ALSA drivers they are now 'dmix'd by default on most sound cards.. Previously people would have to go and edit their asoundrc files to enable dmix to get more then one sound at a time on most sound cards. But with mplayer and most decent alsa supporting sound applications it's possible to specify them to output directly to spdif out without having to go through any layer of software remixing or anything like that.