Re: SoundBlaster Live!, /dev/audio, and bad sound quality

[Rick Macdonald <rickmacd@shaw.ca>]

On Sun, 3 Mar 2002, Richard Cobbe wrote:

> Greetings, all.
> 
> New sound card (actually, new computer).  It's a SoundBlaster Live!, so
> I've compiled in support for the emu10k1 module.
> 
> Up-to-date potato, kernel 2.2.20, SMP.
> 
> In general, everything works fine, except that sending .au files to
> /dev/audio has really lousy sound quality.  You can hear the sound, but
> there's a loud hissing or static sound on top of it.  I had this
> behavior both with emu10k1 v0.7 included with the 2.2.20 source, and
> emu10k1 v0.18 that I just downloaded from SourceForge.  I tried playing
> with various mixer settings, but that didn't help.  The only way I could
> get rid of the hissing was by turning the volume all the way down.
> 
> Other sound operations, like playing MP3s or WAVs in xmms, work fine; no
> hissing or static at all.  (I only tried this with v0.18 of the driver,
> though.)
> 
> I don't know that many things use /dev/audio any more, so this isn't
> that big a deal, but I'd like to get this working---especially because I
> typically use english.au from www.kernel.org to test the sound system
> after I change things.  Nice, easy, and short.

I wonder if it's meant to work. "cat english.au > /dev/audio" on my system
also sounds horrible, but the same file sounds fine when played with
xanim, esdplay or "play". I actually don't know where "play" came from.
"bplay", from the bplay package, sounds horrible just like cat does.

I think cat'ing the file _used_ to sound OK on the old sound card (SB16)
that I had before the the SBLive.

...RickM...