Ubuntu – Extremely poor sound quality after upgrading from 15.10 to 16.04

16.04hda-intellenovosoundupgrade

This is a bit of an odd problem, but after upgrading to Xenial, something went wrong with my sound quality, which was working beautifully under 15.10.

After the upgrade, there is a strong distortion that sounds as if I had blown speakers (I don't). This is true for system sounds or any audio/video files I play. Even with the volume at 50%, it's still a problem.

I have no idea where to begin as this has never happened before. It applies across distros/DEs as it affects Ubuntu MATE and Kubuntu as well as my main Unity installation. I've tried fiddling with the sound settings, ALSA Mixer, and the Pulseaudio EQ, but other than that, I have no idea how to troubleshoot the sound card.

Edit: As requested, I've added additional information.

My PC is a Lenovo Y480

My soundcard is:

Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)

The output of sudo aplay -l is:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC269VC Analog [ALC269VC Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: ALC269VC Digital [ALC269VC Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Best Answer

A change to your alsa-base.conf in /etc/modprobe.d/ may be needed but it is not possible to say for certain as you have not listed what make and model your computer is (there are sometimes specific changes for specific hardware required in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and your device may not have the correct device selected even if it is not a device requiring special changes in alsa-base.conf). For example, we need to output of sudo aplay -l and lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio" should show exactly your sound card, or you need to make changes and perhaps add some packages. Please list your device and the output of the sudo aplay -l command so that we can be more helpful.

This should also be useful to you: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting

Respectfully, David

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