Arch Linux

id98350

Member

Registered: 2022-09-03

Posts: 16

Sound output and playback question

I have a fairly simple sound system built into the PC board
intel HD audio ( hardvare version old, 2010 )
- the question is why if you output sound through Alsa
- the sound is just very bad, through 3.5mm headphones
  However, if you install pipewire, the sound becomes much better! (or pulse)

Is it possible to do something like Alsa would output a quality sound? Without packages pulse or pipewire

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,657

Re: Sound output and playback question

You need to elaborate on what sound under which circumstances and played to which device exactly. Assuming a standard ALSA setup with dmix and you are playing to the dmixed hw:0,0 node that is set up by default then it is quite likely that your audio source needs to be resampled to the hardcoded 48kHz sample rate dmix opens the device at. The default resampler used by the dmix chain will use a trivial algorithm, you can install alsa-plugins which will afaik even up that default to something backed by speex (... it does: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Advanc … resampling ). In addition to that there's a lot more logic and intelligence in pulse/pipewire that allow them to set latency and sampling rates more fluidly (i.e. if you start out with a 44kHz source they can completely avoid resampling by opening the device at that rate from the get go) all of this is stuff that you can't set up in that way with plain ALSA since all of it's config chain is static (and requires to user to know how ALSA operates in order to somewhat intelligently manipulate this)