Poor Linux sound quality, possible driver issue?

beovox

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Jun 23, 2014
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Newbie, my first Linux pc is less than a week old, using Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon

Can't seem to get a good audio output.

I have two options for sound Built-in audio digital (hdmi) no output at all
Built-in audio analogue awful sound quality

My motherboard is a gigabyte z97m-ds3h and cpu intel i5 4590

sound card is a realtek acl887.

I've browsed and found lots of other people having the same issue, and lots of fixes. I'm not familiar with using Terminal though so I need some help!

very grateful for any assistance!!
 
Solution
This particular motherboard is only about two months old (gigabyte lists april 2014)
Most likely the Ubuntu does not yet contain the correct firmware for this chipset yet.

You can try latest kernel (3.16rc2), alsa/alsa firmware. Via a PPA or compile from source.

You can also try to use the proprietary driver provided by realtek (scroll down to bottom, use linux 3.0 diver from 5.21.2014)
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=24&PFid=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

can you also post the output of "lspci -vv" to pastebin.com ?
I can find no documentation on "acl887" existing. Even in the realtek driver, 887 does not exist:
http://pastebin.com/AWcbwGfD

spankmon

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Dec 31, 2011
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Probably the PCM volume is 100% which causes distortion. Open a terminal and enter alsamixer then hit f6 key and select the currently used soundcard, then when the mixer shows... use the arrow keys to find the PCM volume control and lower it to about 70%. The distortion should clear up. You might need to reduce the PCM volume even more if there is still some nastiness.
 

beovox

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Jun 23, 2014
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4,510
Spankmon,

When I hit F6, I have 3 options "- (default") which comes up with 00 S/PDIF
"hd intel hdmi" ditto
"hda intel" even on the lowest pcm setting, the distortion is still there
 

spankmon

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Dec 31, 2011
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18,860
And the distortion continues even when you lower the master volume on the taskbar? It would help to list your speaker setup and which application you are using. Some of the media players can overdrive the audio in which case you just lower the volume on the specific app.
 
This particular motherboard is only about two months old (gigabyte lists april 2014)
Most likely the Ubuntu does not yet contain the correct firmware for this chipset yet.

You can try latest kernel (3.16rc2), alsa/alsa firmware. Via a PPA or compile from source.

You can also try to use the proprietary driver provided by realtek (scroll down to bottom, use linux 3.0 diver from 5.21.2014)
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=24&PFid=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

can you also post the output of "lspci -vv" to pastebin.com ?
I can find no documentation on "acl887" existing. Even in the realtek driver, 887 does not exist:
http://pastebin.com/AWcbwGfD
 
Solution