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#1 2022-08-10 21:16:11

Ophrys
Member
Registered: 2019-12-04
Posts: 22

[Sound blaster Z SE] How to improve sound quality?

Hello,

I have recently acquired a Sound blaster Z SE in order to improve my system sound quality. The embedded DAC seemed pretty fine for the price.

The purpose of this post is to get the best possible quality.

I have followed some steps:

1/ In alsamixer, I have unmutted Master, PCM and Front, and mutted everything else (by default, many FX effects are active, which results in an awful sound).
2/ Still in alsamixer, I have switched the last entry from speakers to headphone (I write this because many people make post about getting no sound from this card).
3/ I have created /etc/asound.conf (I understand it takes precedence over /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf (?) ) with:

defaults.pcm.card 0
defaults.pcm.device 0
defaults.ctl.card 0

defaults.pcm.dmix.rate 44100
defaults.pcm.rate_converter "speexrate_best"

after checking that alsa-plugins and libsamplerate were installed on my system.

I understood that speexrate_best would be the best choice. But I read some mentions of samplerate_best (?).
And I set 44100 Hz by default so there is no conversion when I listen to Qobuz in CD quality.

Now, I wonder how to improve the sound further. I made a comparison with the Qobuz application on Windows in Wasapi exclusive mode. And the sound is really better.

- Is there another module I could use (even a proprietary one)? It looks like the module in use is snd_hda_intel, which seems to rely on snd_hda_codec_ca0132.
- I wonder if I should get rid of Pulseaudio. The thing is that I am no longer familiar with the way the sound in handled on recent distributions.
- Is there a way to check that the parameters I put in asound.conf are taken into account?
- Any idea what I should do next?

Thank you very much!

Last edited by Ophrys (2022-08-10 21:50:17)

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