hello. i installed Slackware64-14.1 on my asus laptop with the intel i5, and realtek hd sound.

I used to have Win7, Win8 run on this laptop, both systems sounds are not clear, muddy, so that I depressed about my poor sound chips & earphones.
when boot from the "huge" kernel, the music & voice & songs sound much better.
however changed to the "generic" kernel, it sounds as under Win 7 & 8.

Why does that happen ?

Once I upgraded from 14.1 to the current, and the sounds got terrible again.
I changed to the Archlinux distro, and sounds are same terrible to Win 7 & 8, and the "generic" kernel.

the inner temprature of running Slackware64 is much warmer all the time. I checked the fans and cpu freq frequency as the docs online, it should be normal.

the huge kernel built all modules statically inside the kernel, while the generic loads them on demand or based on certain modules that are configured to be loaded by the users.
You should know what modules that are being used by your system and place them on /etc/rc.d/rc.modules/

not sure if this helps you. I had good luck with my realtek but I changed systems and mother boards and the new system 14.1 with the VT chip was sad. and I also noticed that the realtek on my older board for 14.1 had some issues also.
this is what I did.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...el-4175488847/
it really helped me. when I stream music and video the sound is much more better. MO Better.