OK, good morning gang

now, why are some distro's louder than others?
meaning, like Tinycore-2.2rc1 with only OSS, is louder than Ubuntu, Slack(slack is closest), and Puppy Linux is lowest?

I mean, you boot up tinycore and put it on aol radio, crank OSS up to 100% and you can barely keep the headphones on!

Does RAM usage affect the stereo sound output?

I'm sure Ubuntu has more sound stuff than my little 60mb tinycore,
but it's nowhere near as loud.

any ideas?
thanks

Are they all using the same sound system, that is Alsa, Pulse, something else?
jdk

OH, thanks for quick response jdkaye
Um, that's a good question...?

I'm not sure about Ultimate-Edition-2.2(ubuntu-9.04), but it has Everything!
Puppy has OSS and alsa.

Tinycore just has OSS.

I'm pretty sure Ultimate has everything under the sun to do with sound, but yet still lower than tinycore

Slack is a full install, so also probably has everything.

All of them are on same Box, a hp a810n amd athlon64 3300+ 2.4ghz with ac97 hi-def

But when you make your comparison tests they need to be all using the same system to be fair. So if you're using OSS on one, you should be using it on all of them for your test.

The only other variable I can think of is mixer settings. You want those to be all the same, right? They may default to different settings so you'd need to check that.
cheers,
jdk

Yes, of course your right.

I basically just adjusted all of them the same mixer settings and did the comparison.

Barring that though, Tinycore Rocks!
I'm punishing my 300w pc speakers and the sound is unbelieveably clear with tinycore too
I'm gonna add libsound and alsa to tinycore and see what happens...

Cool! Let us know how it turns out. Unbelievably clear sound is a good thing.
cheers,
jdk

I've never been happy with the sound volume that ALSA produces on my systems. It's nowhere near the volume/quality of that which Windows on the same hardware produces and even with the volume turned up to maximum on my external amplifier and with all the alsa mixers set to 100 (which adds distortion so is not really an option) it barely produces enough volume to fill the room when listening to music.

I've been using Linux for my music for a long time, and there was never a problem with the old OSS/Free sounds system. When I get around to installing Slackware 13 when it releases I'll be putting OSSv4 on it. I've given up on ALSA.