Arch Linux

Uruz2012

Member

Registered: 2009-06-02

Posts: 9

poor sound quality in alsa and unable to use alsamixer

I'm having very poor sound quality using alsa. The sound is very quiet and when I turn the speakers up there is a constant crackling and high pitched noise even when I'm not playing any sounds. I tried pulseaudio but nothing changed so I went ahead and uninstalled it.

When I try to use alsamixer to adjust the volume levels I get this error:

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device or directory

I've checked and my user account is part of the sound group. I also tried reinstalling the kernel as instructed in the wiki.

I'm kind of at my wits end here because I can't even get into alsamixer to fix the problem.

I wasn't sure what type of info is needed to troubleshoot this problem so if you need more info please tell me and I will post it.

edit:Well, I got alsamixer to work after deleting some config files that I had monkeyed around with. The sound quality is still fairly poor though.

Last edited by Uruz2012 (2009-06-07 02:54:41)

MeathooK

Member

Registered: 2008-11-07

Posts: 17

Re: poor sound quality in alsa and unable to use alsamixer

I just switched from ALSA to OSSv4, and I love it. Finally can listen to music movies/music at more than 2.0 You may check it out. I can't help  you with the sound quality issue though, it's not that ALSA sounds bad...I just think OSS has higher sound quality.

FallenWizard

Member

From: Vienna/ Austria

Registered: 2007-12-10

Posts: 99

Re: poor sound quality in alsa and unable to use alsamixer

I'm having very poor sound quality using alsa. The sound is very quiet and when I turn the speakers up there is a constant crackling and high pitched noise even when I'm not playing any sounds. I tried pulseaudio but nothing changed so I went ahead and uninstalled it.

When I try to use alsamixer to adjust the volume levels I get this error:

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device or directory

I've checked and my user account is part of the sound group. I also tried reinstalling the kernel as instructed in the wiki.

I'm kind of at my wits end here because I can't even get into alsamixer to fix the problem.

I wasn't sure what type of info is needed to troubleshoot this problem so if you need more info please tell me and I will post it.

edit:Well, I got alsamixer to work after deleting some config files that I had monkeyed around with. The sound quality is still fairly poor though.

What soundcard?

If emu10k1: Try to reduce the pcm value, helped for me in the past.

and delete /etc/asound.conf, pulseaudio modifies it as far as I know.

Last edited by FallenWizard (2009-06-08 23:01:45)

Uruz2012

Member

Registered: 2009-06-02

Posts: 9

Re: poor sound quality in alsa and unable to use alsamixer

I actually fixed it by randomly goofing around with settings in alsamixer without pulse. I'm not even sure what I did

daniel1988

Member

Registered: 2009-06-28

Posts: 34

Re: poor sound quality in alsa and unable to use alsamixer

I had the same problem and fixed it by setting pcm to ~70, thank you FallenWizard. This "fix" is not only for emu10k1 - I have nFroce2 chipset with soundstorm: 00:05.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce Audio Processing Unit (rev a2)