I'm very disappointed about the sound quality on music when using Ubuntu 11.10 compared to Windows 7.
I use Audacious (Winamp on W7) and no matter how much I decrease the volume slider it's still giving me distorted sound and it's so annoying.
I tried the PulseAudio Equalizer as I read but it gets worse.
Ubuntu – Ubuntu 11.10 vs Windows 7 music quality
musicsound
Related Solutions
The same thing happened to me when I was using Ubuntu for the first time. The reason for me was that Ubuntu had the volume of speakers set to a too high value. Solving this problem is very easy:
- Using the sound indicator, open Sound Settings and set the sound volume slider at "unamplified", as shown in the image:
I hope this solves the problem.
One easy to use tool is Audacity which has the capability of showing distortion in your original file in an easy to under stand graphical manner. Simply import your file and then activate the clipping detection by using:
View --> Show Clipping
and you will see vertical red lines to indicate where the distortion is occurring. See below on a stereo mp3 file of my own:
This will give you an idea of any distortion in the original file, Audacity also has a tool that you might like to try to fix the issue under:
Effect --> Clip Fix
which I confess has had varied results on my own system...
References:
Best Answer
You could try Open Sound System (OSSv4) with production quality enabled in the ossxmix. Unfortunately this requiers building it from source and also removing ALSA, PulseAudio from your Ubuntu and setting applications backends to OSSv4.
You should post the output of lspci -v command (run it in terminal) for audio device section. When you will know what's your soundcard then you can check if it is supported by Open Sound System.
Ubuntu community documentation regarding OpenSound has commands for removing ALSA (reboot requiered) and of course installation of OSSv4 (including compiling from source). There is also the official guide regarding that process. Before you start the compilation open up software-properties-gtk application as root and check the source code on the first tab. Then update your software sources and run this command:
You should change configure script GRC_MAX_QUALITY=3 to GRC_MAX_QUALITY=6 that's for production quality resampler. Know you can build the .deb package.
When all that is done than it's time for configuring applications. You can also emulate ALSA for applications that doesn't support OSSv4 edit /etc/asound.conf or .asoundrc as per instructions on Arch Linux OSSv4 Wiki.