Hi,

I've googled for a long time now and still haven't found a solution. So I would really appreciate if someone could point me to the right link. Here are the details:

HARDWARE:
1) Laptop with integrated audio chip. lspci reports:
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)
00:11.6 Communication controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 80)
2) IDE DVD RW Sony DW-D56A.

SOFTWARE
1) Debian testing lenny/sid amd64.
2) Kernel 2.6.22.1 (same result with 2.6.18).
3) Alsa sound.

NOTES
1) DVD playback works (e.g. with xine). PCM sound works (e.g. with aplay). So it's not likely to be a broken hardware problem.
2) Alsaconf has not helped.
3) I recall CD audio playback working long time ago, with much older kernels, but only after changing the volume control for the CD input with an audio mixer. So audio CD playback has always been a bit tricky with this laptop.

Thanks.

Both are digital playback, perhaps you CD audio playback should be digital also???

FYI: xine does play audio CD's digitally.

The CD input on sound cards uses the audio cable from the CD or DVD drive to the sound card. Today's computers do not use this cable, so they use digital audio extraction. Check your desire program to make sure DAE is selected or else you will have to climb in your computer and attach the cable.

The quality of DAE is near bit to bit accurate.

The quality of the audio cable connected from the optical drive to the sound card is as good as the DAC from the drive and ADC of the sound card. Also the quality of the audio cable can make the audio sound bad or good and it have to be shielded to minimize RF interference.

The utility alsaconf is useless because it is only there to figure out what module that will work for your sound card. Hopefully, the sound card is not in use while running alsaconf.

Hi Lenard and Electro,

Thanks for your info. Yes, xine plays cd audio, surely using DAE. I was using other apps for this purpose, e.g. kscd or xmms, which almost certainly get analogue audio from the DAC. The prove is that the CD input of the audio mixer has no effect over the audio when using xine for playback.
Therefore, what is failing is alsa when choosing analogue audio from the cd player.
The only drawback of using DAE is that sound suffers some "gaps" from time to time, maybe because of bottleneck in data path from cdrom, while files stored in HDD play smoothly, as well as analogue playback used to.

Regards

Not all optical drives can handle DAE well. Also it does help to clean the lens with a lint free swab and special cleaning solution. Though Sony optical drives age quickly than other drives and in some cases stops writing to discs after a certain amount.

For sure. Lately, I have to clean it very often. I'm quite deceived with this Sony drive.