Poor Quality sound
 

Hi,

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 510m with onboard Intell 855 sound (STAC 9750 AC97). The sound was perfect with WinXP, but with Ubuntu it's tinny and lacks richness and vibrates and distorts at higher volumes. I've played around with Alsamixer and changed the driver from ALSA to OSS4 and it has improved slighlty, but still not perfect.
Is it just not gonna get any better, should I not be expecting it to be as good as WinXP?
I've seen on the Intel site a Linux driver for my controller, it's a tarball but it won't compile after extracting it (read on this forum that someone had the exact same problem with that driver)
Will the Intel driver not help, does the problem go deeper than just the driver?

It would be perfect it you could just wrap the Dell/Intel driver and use that (just like with wireless ndiswrapper).

Thanks.

You also have to play with pulse, esound, gnome audio, and arts.
Either we use a soundblaster emul10k1 or output to a floor bass and two tweeters for our sound.