Sound card recommendations?

[Ariff Abdullah]

On Fri, 25 Nov 2005 16:33:48 +0100
Sascha Klauder <sklauder at trimind.de> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 01:15:48PM +0100, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> > Sascha Klauder <sklauder at trimind.de> wrote:
> > >treble mixer controls.  I've got an SB Live! as well, and it
> > >just sounds crappy in comparison to the AWE, even with 4Front
> > >drivers.
> > Which FreeBSD version did you used to test? If anything below a
> > recent
> 
>  I'm running a recent 6.0-STABLE with PREEMPTION and 
> hw.snd.pcm0.buffersize set to 16384.
> 
> > (http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/)? If with the patches: did you
> > played with with the new pci latency_timer sysctl (it may help to
> > get a very good sound output)?
> 
>  I'm well aware of Ariff's quite excellent patchset, but
> I was not refering to the problem with crackling noise and
> stuttering output on SB Live cards.  
> 
>  Without lapsing into an audiophile discussion, the Live
> card sounds just »flat« in comparison to the AWE64 with
> properly adjusted bass and treble mixers.
> 
This is a known deficiency of sblive especially among audiophiles. Its
internal sample rate converter (convertor?) and the behaviour of
sampling everything out as 48k are pretty much unsatisfactory.

Now, if you're talking about crackling or stuttering sound, you should
give those patchsets a try. If you think something had to be done
about the pci latency timer, you can use pciconf(8) to adjust/increase
its value or perhaps using this wrapper:
	http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/utils/pcilattimer
.. since pci latency_timer is available only for snd_es137x.



--
Ariff Abdullah
MyBSD

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