[ale] audio blues

[Sean Kilpatrick]

One headache with new mobo:  sound.

Remember what happened when you lent out an LP to a >friend< and it came
back so scratched up you could barely hear the music for the static and
pops?

That's what the audio sounds like from any source: video, mp3, ogg,
whatever.  Video is the least bad, which might be a clue that this is
more a software problem than a hardware one. Standard audio files,
including system generated sounds, are unbearably bad as the skips
combine with the scratchy sound to make the file unrecognizable.

I thought it might be a simple hardware problem with the female jack on
the mobo.  Tried the front headphone jack with the speaker set and no
change.  Tried using fairly good headphones; again no change.

So, assuming, there is a bad component on the mobo, can I sidestep the
problem by installing a low-end sound card or is the needed signal still
going to be influenced by the bad component?  By low-end I mean a $20 -
$40 card.  I don't need a high-end sound card as any game I might play
will be making beeps and boops and not much else.

If it might be a software problem, any clues on how to tweek the
alsa.conf file would be appreciated. I looked at it but couldn't make
much sense out of it.  If another piece of software might do a better
job than ALSA, I'm willing to try it.

(I am NOT trying to start a flame war on the relative merits of ALSA --
I'd just like to be able to tell Mozart from Gershwin.)

Sean