why is sound not working properly ?

["James D. Freels" <freelsjd@ornl.gov>]

Debian-KDE2 colleagues:

I have all the latest potato kde2 packages installed here on my work
machine and home machine.  Everything seems to be working properly
except the sound on my work machine.  I have the same setup on my home
machine, but the sound works properly on that machine.  The difference
is that the home machine is using the kernel-internal sound drivers
for the pci-card soundblaster-16, whereas the work machine is using
the kernel-external ALSA sound drivers for the Yamaha DS-XG PCI
(YMF740C) on the motherboard.

The sound on the work (ALSA Yamaha drivers) machine is garbled.  It
works somewhat, but not entirely correctly.  Basically, all
sound-enabled applications (such as realplayer, xmms, etc.) that are
not kde2 applications, the sound works fine.  On the other hand, all
kde2 sound-enabled applications (internal wav player, kaiman, etc.)
the sound comes out, but is garbled.  On the home machine, all sound
works properly.

I suspect an 8 bit/16 bit issue or some other incompatibility.

Are there any ideas on how to fix this?  I have seen several
sound-related issues on this mailing list, so I apologize if this is a
FAQ. 

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