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Sound Card Distortion


manly
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I have an Asus MEW-AML motherboard with an integrated sound card. The chipset is a CS4280, and the module is the cs46xx, which is *supposed* to be compatible. The output is connected to my 5-speaker minisystem. When I play mp3 or ogg files in XMMS, the sound quality is much lower than I would expect. At first I thought it was a hardware problem, but the sound is fine under Winamp with Win98.

 

It appears that the card uses the AC-97 codec . It's 'software based' - does this mean that it's similar in function to WinModems? lsmod shows that the ac-97 module is loaded.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Andrew

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So instead of using the ALSA version that came with MDK 9 you downloaded and compiled the older version? Did that fix a similar problem?

 

Either way, I'm going to try the alsa 0.5, and see what happens.

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Guest dbezona

Before you get too far down the complicated road of messing with your sound drivers, try opening up one of the mixer apps (aumix, whatever) and taking the PCM level down a couple of notches. On my box, having it up within a couple of notches of full causes distortion.

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Changing the mixer settings had no effect. I've been using xmms. Changing equalizer settings usually causes even more distortion. I've got quake III installed, but I've been too busy fragging to pay attention to the sound ;-).

 

Something I've thought of: xmms is using the OSS output plugin, which is emulated by ALSA. Could this emulation be screwing things up? I tried installing the ALSA plugin, but it crashes xmms.

 

Andrew

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There is some distortion in Q3, but it doesn't seem to be as prominent. SDL games seem to work OK. mpg123 sounds identical to xmms.

 

I'm going to try ALSA 0.5x. Hopefully it will work.. :-)

 

Andrew

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Somehow, it appears that I was running OSS instead of ALSA. draksound changed it to ALSA output, and now the kind of distortion is different. Instead of just lower-quality sound, the frequencies are shifted. My sound system has dolby 5.0 surround; and it's interpreting the voices as rear channel instead of center.

 

I had MDK9 running on an older system with a Soundblaster Vibra ISA card, and it worked fine. I can't use that card instead, because the motherboard only has PCI slots.

 

The mixer settings appear to be correct.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Andrew

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