Linux Audio the way to go!?

[TBM]

Yes there is! I have to say that I do very much agree with Soundcheck and Gordon! This is exatly what I experience in my setup (Avantgarde Duo, 300B SET 100kg monoblocks, S&B TVC, Lenovo R500, USB DAC). If you try to use same setup on say 2.6.29.5-rt21 vs 2.6.29.5 vanilla (no changes but that), there are sound differences on my high resoulution system even though the CPU only does 5% of activity or so. If you have a "low-mid-hifi" setup, I guess that this difference is not so easy to catch. Lowering the latency does make quite a difference in my system, I can't really explain it mathematically like "quod erat demonstrandum", but lowering latency does improve sound. Bass gets tighter and deeper, timber is longer and 3D effect increases...
IMHO: Keep an open mind, that never hurts...

Cheers

[1audio]

Perhaps you could tell us more about your USB DAC, The Lenovo and the software you are using.

[soundcheck]

@TBM: Where have you been? THX for (finally) joining this (my) defense-battle aganst the
the other fellows over here.

It seems that you're pretty much up2date with your kernel.
I just looked up certain performance benchmarks. 2.6.29.5-rt seems to be a real
great improvement over older patches.

BTW I am getting away from ZEN. I'll try the mainline kernel plus rt-patch.
Please let us know your setup. (OS+kernel+config) ( You can also drop me a mail)
I'd like to bring the kernel related Wiki section up2date.

Cheers

[soundcheck]

Hi there.

If somebody is using ecasound, checkout my Wiki update. I did a slight change to the git compile options.

ecasound introduced liboil to improve its performance by using processor relevant features such as SSE.

Check it out. I think you'll like the result. Let me know what you experience.

Enjoy.

[soundcheck]

One more for today.

I updated the Kernel Wiki. ZEN is dead, at least for now from my perspective.

I described how to build a customized mainline 2.6.29.5 kernel patched with the rt21 patch set provided by Thomas Gleixner..

I think it is worth a try. The guys improved the patch-set a lot lately.

Enjoy.

[soundcheck]

Another one:

I added another paragraph to the Kernel Wiki. I describe how you can install a 2.6.30 Ubuntu kernel on a system like Jaunty.

This way you'll have access to a much newer Alsa. Further you can use other new features. They have done a lot with filesystems such as BTRFS. Of course there are much more interesting changes. You need to look up the kernel changelog.

The upgrade is a pretty trivial exercise. Everybody can try it.


Enjoy.

[mefistofelez]

Greetings all,

I was wondering if you could post here or, preferably in Wiki, the sound card you are using with your Linux boxes, as well as any pertinent comments.

Thank you,

M

[TBM]

Yeah, l moved from ZEN to RT some time ago, RT is superior.
I am a bit on/off the web.
There are often a "religious" discussion regarding audio, and there are a lot of (interesting) meanings, but unfortunately there are a lot of people not having good enough equipment to even hear difference on original CD and a CDR copy or a new cable in their system, and those guys are often the most hard headed in their opinions. If the spec is better it does not automatically mean that it sounds better...
Keep an open mind, there are a lot of "strange things" that influences sound...
Keep it up!

T

[.: ZMN :.]

Hi Soundcheck,

Is there any reason why any of the following packages is not included in the list of MPD compilation requirements?

git
libao-dev
libsamplerate0-dev

Also, in the ecasound pages: 'git-clone' is no longer available on 9.04. It has been replaced by 'git clone'. And 'sudo autogen-vc.sh' did not work, but 'sudo ./autogen-vc.sh' did. Very minor details.

All in all: Setting things up was easy, thanks to your wiki.

[EddieV]

Hello Soundcheck,

I was about to try to install the 2.6.30 kernel as indicated in your WIKI, but I saw something strange: the second and the third dpkg command are identical. Is this a typo because the third command has no effect as far as I can see, or is another command required here?

Kind regards,
Eddie