Mysteries of sound in Fedora-9

[Timothy Murphy]

Tim wrote:

>> Someone mentioned trying something like "cat foo.ogg > /dev/dsp".
>> In my case, when sound is working this produces a white noise.
>> Is this testing the sound driver
>> (in my case snd_intel8x0 , I assume) directly?
> 
> If you catted a raw audio format, rather than a compressed one, to the
> sound device, you ought to hear sound.  Hearing garbage isn't really
> going to prove much.

Thanks for your interest and perseverance.

I gather that .wav is an uncompressed format (according to
<http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Computer_Science/2005/digital_audio_formats.asp>),
but I just hear white noise if I cat this,
while I hear the sound properly with aplay:
-----------------------------------
[tim at elizabeth ~]$ cat /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav > /dev/dsp
[tim at elizabeth ~]$ aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav
-----------------------------------

Do you actually hear the words if you give the first command above?