Hi,
Recently I bought the USB Sound Blaster Audigy 2 NX card and 5.1 speaker system for my laptop. I'm really happy with the sound quality on Windows. Unfortunately, the sound quality on Linux is not so good - I hear various clicks and skips. I'm guessing that it may be caused by that the sound is not delivered on time to some buffer or something like that.
I changed default-sample-rate in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf but it did not solve the problem. Is there something else then I can try to use to improve sound quality?
Pulseaudio uses a lot of resources 1270 michal 20 0 650m 14m 11m R 14.6 0.7 6:28.79 pulseaudio
BTW. A matter of fact, I was surprised that this card works under Linux out of box. There were problems with the card under Windows - drivers are installed automatically, but card does not work until I installed the drivers from the manufacturer.
I have experienced effects like those you described when Pulseaudio (or perhaps something else in the audio-processing chain) must do sample-rate conversion, such as from 44.1 KHz to 48KHz, to drive my USB speakers.
Sox has been an effective solution for me. Try "play" (a link to sox that denotes output to sound hardware instead of a file) to learn whether sox may offer superior sample-rate conversion that avoids the problems you hear.
There are probably a handful of tools that will display information about sound devices. Audacity has a convenient one:
Help -> Audio Device Info
that displays supported sample rates. For example, I see:
Default capture device number: 13 Default playback device number: 13 ============================== Device ID: 0 Device name: ALSA: Bose USB Audio: USB Audio (hw:0,0) Input channels: 0 Output channels: 6 Low Input Latency: -1.000000 Low Output Latency: 0.010667 High Input Latency: -1.000000 High Output Latency: 0.042667 Supported Rates: 48000 ==============================
Output like this may display a needed sample rate for your USB sound device (48000 in my case). If you use sox to convert a file to the target rate before you play it, and it then sounds good, this confirms the problem involves resampling.
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Michał Piotrowski -
Richard Ryniker