If you're looking for quality audio you came to the wrong neighborhood...

In my experience, this happens if you set the PCM volume at 100%.

My Slackware box is hooked up to a TEAC A-H01. You'd better believe that I'm getting quality audio in this neighbourhood.

We've had another thread here from someone using a Dragonfly DAC.

Motherboard sound cards tend to be garbage in the first place, and to have their shortcoming amplified if you use ALSA. You don't realize how bad they are until you've tried a good USB DAC, and those always work perfectly with ALSA.

I just installed the alsa plugin from http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.../alsa-plugins/
What do I do now?

1 members found this post helpful.

1. open a console and run alsamixer
check if pcm is over 0dB

2. vlc has it's own loudness control, check if it is over 100%

otherwise there is no reason why one source would have better quality then another

1 members found this post helpful.

open your .asoundrc or /etc/asound.conf; append the following:
you can switch from speexrate to speexrate_medium / speexrate_best depend on your pc resource.

1 members found this post helpful.

I dont see PCM as an option in alsamixer: there is master, headphone, and speaker; all of which are over 0.
Also, the vlc volume control doesnt work; what ever volume that is set in the KDE mixer will be the sound level I hear; vlc has no control over the sound, unless I set it to 0.

But that doesnt even work any more, since it will just not play sound anymore. Every time I fix the sound problem, it gives me bad sound and then will have no sound after a reboot.

My files in both look like this now:

defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.ctl.card 1
defaults.pcm.rate_converter "speexrate"

But vlc or any of my media players wont play sound at all with any video. But my web browser has fantastic sound.

try comment out first 2 lines.

hmm
intel drivers usually have PCM that goes over 0dB
just to be sure check if "Card:" in the top left corner is the right one (F6 to change to another)

anyway, afaik VLC does it's own volume adjust in software (that's why it goes over 100%)
either try setting the proper thingies in tools->settings->sound, or upgrading to VLC from current

a small troubleshooting tip, when all else is murky;
open a terminal and put in
watch cat /proc/asound/card1/pcm0p/sub0/hw_params
(path may vary a bit, here it's for card1 device0)
it will let you see what the card is doing
turn off FF and all players when experimenting, as if the card is open the new settings won't come to affect until it closes

Ok, now something really weird is happening. Suddenly, I can watch videos on my Vlc and media players; which I didnt lift a finger to do anything to allow this. But the flash player has a problem playing web vids, and will cause a loop before it crashes.

This is a Flash problem that just gets worse in Mozilla environments. AFAIK there are no on-stop-shop solid fixes but there are workarounds. One major help is setting up your browser to prefer HTML 5. YouTube has a specific page for this and there are addons for Firefox. Additionally if you setup the Flask plugin to "Ask Me", while it is a bit of a pita for something that "should just work", it does prevent stuttering, stacking resulting in crashes.

Maybe, it's just a software mixing problem, you only can have 1 application to use sound card at one time, you can't have multiple application play sound at same time. Just following the links genss provide and find a software mixer put into your .asoundrc or /etc/asound. And you can still use plugin converter.

That seems like such a simple solution to such a well known problem one has to wonder why it isn't the default?