I recently installed a new SB Live! on my Gentoo computer. I'm using the emu10k1 driver, which is integrated in kernel 2.6.*. I physically installed the card, recompiled the kernel modules, installed the module, and ran alsaconf. The sound works, but it is not very good. When playing music in XMMS, the tracks seem to be out of proportion. The background music will be so loud that it makes me cringe, yet the voice seems to be coming from another room. I played with the different tracks in alsamixer to see if changing them helped the problem, but no luck. I'm pretty sure that this is simply a problem with my mixer configuration, but I haven't yet been able to figure out how to fix it. Could anyone please give me some advice?

Regards,
Edward S. Rice

I also think that it's a mixer config problem myself. In the new alsa drivers for the emu10k1, there are a bunch of wierd new features that generally don't help anything, such as the 3-D sound setting, which seems to be what is set incorrectly on your system. As far as I know, the 3-D setting tries to make your speakers sound farther apart by artificially "widening" the music by further separating channels offset to the left or the right even further. In order to fix this, just go into Kmix (if you're using KDE) or whatever GNOME's mixer is (sorry about lack of name, i haven't used GNOME in a good while). You may have to go into advanced settings to enable showing of the 3-D slider in order to access it, but after doing so, you just need to slide it down to minimum. I believe that for some reason, occasionally the defaults for the 3D setting get set to max when alsa is installed, for no good reason. Hope this helps!

I tried the 3D solution, the mixer already had 3D off.
A friend alerted me that there's an XMMS plugin that gets loaded by default called "Extra Stereo Plugin" that doesn't really work well. It makes some tracks sound far off. Turns out that this wasn't an ALSA problem.
Thanks for your help!

Regards,
Edward S. Rice