I have removed and reinstalled both pulse audio and sound,still poor sound.Sound is set to not exceed 100%;audio on web apps such as Netflix and youtube not effected.Also no problem with DVDs played from the HDD.This is an intigrated sound card on an HP 7100 Elite Microtower.i7,860,Realtec ALC8885.Would an new sound card solve the issue?

Have you tested the audio files on another computer to rule out the possibility that they are corrupt in some fashion?

I'm confident that they aren't but it's worthwhile to check.

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Sometimes pulseaudio gets a bit flustered. Restarting it helps it recover. Or a reboot.

$ pulseaudio --kill
$ pulseaudio --start

Note that it's auto --start (via init or systemd) if "autospawn = no" is NOT in the /etc/pulse/client.conf. Sometimes you have to remove and re-add the default soundcard. I have a pulse over the network setup and it'll get jank when two different connections are flooding the sound daemon. A stop/start of pulse or a stop/start of all the things using pulse tends to clear the air. Originally pulse only supported 48kHz, so if you tailor your sound apps to default to that you can avoid a lot of quirks. Most of my current pulse issus are because my networked pulse runs on a 1.48GHz dual core over a mostly saturated 10/100 wired network. A machine that also plays long form youtube content.

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You are correct,frankbell;the same files sound fine on my even older laptop.Both machines are HP,with intigrated sound cards.Sounds like Shadow7 is on the right track.The only other thing I have'nt tried yet is playing them on a different player program,which seems unlikely the be a solution.I assume the settings are default;I don't know enough about the hardware specs to want to change from default settings.It seems to be working better since I re-installed the pulse audio(also removed fluendo).Guess I will keep doing the same every time it decides to go fuzzy on me.Thanks for the input.

I've never had to troubleshoot a problem like this one, but one of the members of my LUG posted this link about Pulse Audio. You might find something to help your troubleshooting efforts: https://gavv.github.io/blog/pulseaudio-under-the-hood/

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Wow ,frankbell.I had no idea there was so much going on in Pulse audio.Thanks.I also tried a different player-VLC instead of Audacious.Seems to be working now.