Greetings, all. New sound card (actually, new computer). It's a SoundBlaster Live!, so I've compiled in support for the emu10k1 module.
Up-to-date potato, kernel 2.2.20, SMP. In general, everything works fine, except that sending .au files to /dev/audio has really lousy sound quality. You can hear the sound, but there's a loud hissing or static sound on top of it. I had this behavior both with emu10k1 v0.7 included with the 2.2.20 source, and emu10k1 v0.18 that I just downloaded from SourceForge. I tried playing with various mixer settings, but that didn't help. The only way I could get rid of the hissing was by turning the volume all the way down. Other sound operations, like playing MP3s or WAVs in xmms, work fine; no hissing or static at all. (I only tried this with v0.18 of the driver, though.) I don't know that many things use /dev/audio any more, so this isn't that big a deal, but I'd like to get this working---especially because I typically use english.au from www.kernel.org to test the sound system after I change things. Nice, easy, and short. Any suggestions would be appreciated, Richard