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@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
