Is it just me or does sound quality suck in Fedora?

[Tim]

A subject line like yours is just ripe for ribbing, but I shall refrain
on making judgements about whether *you* also...   ;-)  I do love a good
double entendre, and the English language serves them so well.

On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 14:20 -0700, RS wrote:
> I noticed some weird issues with my dual boot (Fedora 9/XP)
> workstation at home. I bought a new Creative PCI sound card and I can
> feel a definite improvement in the quality of the sound when compared
> to the onboard solution on XP (much richer bass and treble, nice eq
> settings for different genres)

It's no real surprise that one sound card may sound better than another,
particularly some on-board sound cards.  However, if you're playing
around with boosting bass, treble, or other frequencies, you've gone
away from getting HiFi sound out of a sound card, you're deliberately
making distortions, and any *goodness* about it is purely personal
conjecture without any basis in fact.  Strictly speaking, such tonal
modifications means that the sound card is producing *bad* sound.

If you want good sound, spend money on decent speakers or headphones,
don't mess around with equalisation.  You're only kidding yourself.
Seriously, the sound engineers who produced a recording did a damn good
job in the first place, you're not going to make something better by
diddling with eq on your sound card.

> For once, I need to push the volume settings all the way up to get
> decent quality when watching a DVD or listening to music. At higher
> volume levels, I could detect some background hiss and noise. I
> fiddled with all the mixer settings and went nowhere.

It's not too surprising that DVD sound is quieter than other things,
they're produced that way.  They have a larger dynamic range than most
other recordings (the usable difference between the quietest and loudest
sounds is greater), so they don't have everything recorded at full
blast.  Nominal sounds are generally recorded at a lower nominal level,
than other things, so that there's room for louder sounds to be even
louder.  Also, quieter sounds are not artificially boosted, because the
medium can actually reproduce them without it.

This does mean that the average sound level is often lower, especially
compared to things like heavily compressed music (I mean audio level
compression, not file system compression), such as most pop music, so
people do tend to have to push the volume up a bit higher, and some
cards may have different input sensitivities for DVD analogue input
connections.  If you're hearing bad hiss in this situation, then your
sound card is *not* as good as you thought it was.  Though, if your
sound card is designed reasonably well, turning up the DVD sound level a
bit, to compensate, rather than the master level, would be the way to
go.  Also, don't forget to turn down monitor levels for things that you
don't need (such as microphones, internal speaker/beeper inputs, modem
inputs, etc.), so hisses from their channels aren't mixed in.

>  I have the codecs for mp3 and divx etc from dag wiers. I also ripped
> an audio CD (We love you Norah!) to ogg and mp3 and the quality  of
> the output was poor when compared to XP. I tested this with Rhythmbox,
> XMMS and VLC. 

I have found some players would easily foul up while playing back, such
as Audacity, whereas simpler players, such as XMMS, would happily
playback while I did other things that taxed my system (moved windows
about, chugged through files on the hard drive, etc.).  Some of the
fancier players are just too convoluted, and don't seem to separate the
task of playing the music from other things that can interrupt it (such
as opening and re-arranging a playlist while it's running).

If you're suspicious of your decoders, then test with some uncompressed
audio formats (e.g. WAV), or lossless compressed formats (e.g. flac),
but make sure that you've got good source material to test against.  A
crappy recording isn't going to sound good, no matter what you do.

Ripping has it's problems, too, particularly if you take an analogue
path, rather doing a direct digital stream, or if you have trouble
playing back optical media.

Speaking as someone who works professionally in audio and video
production, I can't say that Windows versus Linux is significantly
different in audio quality.  I am rather demanding of audio quality, and
Linux hasn't disappointed me, even with cheap hardware.  In general,
it's been a sound card, itself, that's either good or bad.  And power
supply noises getting into audio through overall bad system design (some
of that can be overcome by changing your analogue audio wiring inside
and outside of the computer).

Drivers for particular sound cards may be an issue, in some cases, but
that's *those* cards and *those* drivers.  I could certainly point the
finger at some cards that were just awful with Windows, because they
never released good drivers for them, and will never release an update.

MP3 encoding has sounded bad on anything that I've tried, with some
encoders being just bloody awful, even on high bitrates (you can hear
squeaks, burbles, and other strange radiophonic noises that aren't part
of the original sound).  Ogg has always sounded better, almost the same
as uncompressed originals, though I've noticed that I can easily produce
clipping when turning playback volume up too high on an ogg file, that I
don't notice similar clipping effects with other formats.


-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686

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