It might be wise to be reminded of the reason why pulseaudio was introduced in the first place; because bluez 5.x no longer supported ALSA. So, for those of us (like myself) who depend on Bluetooth for their sound have need of PA, and for those whom PA presents no problem, even though they have discrete sound cards, should not worry about its presence.

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A friend of mine asked me to suggest to the Music Producers from this thread, who are worried about their audio mixer latencies on their businesses, this particular Digital Mixer:

https://www.thomann.de/gb/behringer_x_32.htm

Apparently, for only £1455 / $1850 it gives 32 channels of precise quality and latency which never will be reached by a PC, no matter what operating system it runs.

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Happy Slacking hazel...and yes, one of the benefits of Slackware is the many debates and discussions one can have when you are running such a stable distro.

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AFAIK DMix is not a default setup. However in the case of cheap and/or onboard sound devices you could be right since I never use those. I find those somewhat like the old Winmodems where hardware is gutted or crippled and must be supplanted with software. I think I qualified that as "casual listeners" for whom the convenience of PA is a plus, and serious, audiophile users for whom PA just gets in the way and at considerable loss.

You're quite welcome.

JACK is a superb, audiophile quality piece of work that does what PA does and more. It is roughly the equivalent of ASIO for Windows and is an all but essential bit of software for most serious recording work. It is not a tool of convenience like PA and more one of options like ASIO. It requires some setup but is quite intuitive and extremely powerful and eminently configurable, especially with high quality audio hardware. One of the things it emulates is a patch bay so that one can route Inputs and Outputs in many configurations, essential to serious recording work. It is also easy to employ as an on-demand feature, easily toggled on/off. So Jack isn't needed to improve ALSA, just to extend it and offer deeper control.

If you are at all interested in getting back into recording it would be very helpful to look here --- http://studioware.org/ --- for a version of Slackware dedicated to multimedia work. It does have Audacity for simple work but it also has Ardour which is more like ProTools for serious multitrack work needed for Pro and Semi-Pro work.

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That's not a bad piece of hardware though definitely in the Semi-Pro category and lacking in the configurability of a PC since it is a dedicated device with it's own OpSys substantially less FOSS than Linux. Additionally it simply cannot be true that it has a latency lower than a PC since in effect it is an embedded form of PC. With a custom kernel the best instance of latency I deal with is about .0016 seconds. When running multiple loops and plugins worst case rarely exceeds 6msec on a pure ALSA system. That becomes 16-22msec with PA. I assure you that no digital device has Zero Latency and that latency is cumulative. I have not owned that particular Behringer so I haven't had the opportunity to do an actual loopback test on real system latency but I would be shocked if it could match 6-8msec worst case performance, and I'm willing to bet that slightly more than 1msec is not achievable on it in any actual use case. Still a decent chunk of hardware in that price range, though.

I'm not sure how to confirm what the default is on Slackware, but...

Source: https://alsa.opensrc.org/Dmix

Congratulations to those who bashed PulseAudio 'til it became obsolete! That's a hell of dedication!

Meanwhile, enjoy your new PipeWire (aka Pulse Audio and Video) Overlords which apparently is also dependency of Plasma 5.17 too, and maybe you'll be kind to stop beating those mummified horses of PulseAudio and JACK.

https://pipewire.org/

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Yes I am aware of that but AFAIK pretty much all sound cards above $100USD have hardware mixing. When I still had 4 PCI slots I used 4 of these

https://www.esi-audio.com/products/julia/

Now that there are no PCI slots and usually few "extra" PCIe slots, I'm using 2 of these

https://www.esi-audio.com/products/maya44ex/

I expect soon I will need to bite the bullet and go to something from RME similar to what is shown in the following linked video. While this video features an upgrade from an interface primarily employed on Macs, Firewire, the facts explained comparing to USB vs/ PCIe interface as well as explanation of the Latency Problem, applies to all PCs and anyone interested may find this quite clear and informative, especially if you do any recording. While latency is a huge issue with live recording it does exist to some degree if one likes to save Vinyl, Tape of any kind (audio or video) to a digital format, so even you folks may enjoy this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcPgRsji6nM

Not everyone has a $100 sound card or even a dedicated sound card, there are a lot of people who use the onboard audio on their motherboard.

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I last bought a dedicated sound card in 2008. Unless you're a huge audiophile, there really isn't a need for it anymore.

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I definitely notice the difference on my desktop, which has an Audigy X-Fi sound card. Audio sounds awesome out of the box on it, nothing has to be messed around with. No EQ, nothing,

My laptops, on the other hand, are another matter. I have to do a lot of tuning to get things to sound how I want, which is why I'm very thankful for a working qpaeq setup on my main laptop.

I've disabled Pulse altogether on my netbook and just use ALSA, which sounds great now. Initially it was a huge pain in the arse to get alsaequal working how I wanted.

When I removed my X-Fi and switched to onboard, I noticed no difference in audio quality. Maybe it is just the speakers I use or maybe my onboard was decent enough. For my HTPCs, they output directly using HDMI, so I don't know what exactly is handling the audio processing with that (is it tied to the GPU or still using the onboard sound?).

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I guess IBM Thinkpads (now Lenovo) always had decent sound cards. Their builtin one has always jfw with ALSA, even with multiple sound sources. I can be watching a movie and still hear my browser go "bing!" when my wife messages me, which is about the extent to which it is needed.

I've seen lots of discussion about fixing the sound on hazel's computer. Granted, the fix that worked was to remove /etc/asound.conf.

That advice was the wrong way to think about system administration.

The system is up and running, but parts of it aren't working right (or at least, the way you want). As you go poking around, bear in mind that you might poke something the wrong way, and everything comes crashing down.

The #1 priority of a sysadmin is "don't do anything you can't undo". I didn't see where anyone suggested hazel keep a copy of /etc/asound.conf.

The simplest, safest approach is to move said file into a user-home directory, e.g.
Followed by testing, testing, and testing again, maybe even with a system reboot mixed in for good measure. If any stage of testing shows that this action was not a good idea, at least hazel still has the file! It's a simple matter of returning the file to its original location (and reboot, if needed), to get the system back to a semi-working state.

Don't delete anything until you're absolutely sure you don't need it.

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