Ubuntu – XUbuntu 16.04 no bass and poor sound quality

alsapulseaudiosoundxubuntu

I have a AsRock motherboard with Realtek ALC892 chipset.

cat /proc/asound/cards

returns

 0 [PCH            ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
                      HDA Intel PCH at 0xf7110000 irq 29  
 1 [NVidia         ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
                      HDA NVidia at 0xf7080000 irq 17

The main thing is that I don't really hear bass on Audacious when playing music. If there's bass, is really low compared with Windows. I've tried loading a Bass and Treble preset from WinAmp using the Equalizer in Audacious and the sound is very bad, like when having a poor speaker on max volume. This happens both on my 2.0 setup or on my headphones.

How can I improve this?

Best Answer

PulseAudio and ALSA are configured for 44.1KHz 16-bit audio by default which is not bad but not really great.

You can check the current configuration with:

$ pacmd list-sinks | grep sample

It will show something like this:

$ pacmd list-sinks | grep sample
sample spec: s16le 2ch 41000Hz
sample spec: s16le 2ch 41000Hz

To change it, we need to edit the PulseAudio's configuration file:

$ nano /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

Find these in the file:

; resample-method = speex-float-1
; default-sample-format = s16le
; default-sample-rate = 44100

Remove the semicolon and change the values to:

resample-method = src-sinc-medium-quality
default-sample-format = s24le
default-sample-rate = 96000

Save the file by pressing Ctrl+O (to save) and Ctrl+X (to exit).

Restart PulseAudio:

$ pulseaudio -k
$ pulseaudio --start

Check the settings again:

$ pacmd list-sinks | grep sample

It should something like this:

$ pacmd list-sinks | grep sample
sample spec: s32le 2ch 96000Hz
sample spec: s32le 2ch 96000Hz

and we are done!

For more info: https://r3dux.org/2013/12/how-to-enable-high-quality-audio-in-linux/

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