Sound problems.

[Duke, Brian]

My system is a Compaq Deskpro EN P600 machine
I installed 4.8STABLE and configured the Kernel for sound 

option 		PNPBIOS
device		pcm

make buildkernel KERNCONF=RAINBUILD
make installkernel KERNCONF=RAINBUILD

Everything worked like a dream

Brought up XFree86 
then brought up KDE3.1.2.

Started ARTS and tested a sound.  The sound that croaked out sounded like the input signal was too high.
After lots of adjustments I cannot figure out how to reduce the input signal. It sounds like and explosion of white noise.
Here is the drivers that loaded:

rain# grep pcm /var/run/dmesg.boot
pcm0: <ESS 18xx DSP> on sbc0

Can someone help me with the finer points of tweaking here? Every time I press a button this horrendous scratchy noice comes out of my headphones.

  

Brian Duke
Level(3) Communication / TCAM