Sound distortion

[Brian J. Tarricone]

tomw at videotron.ca wrote:
> My wife has noticed a big difference in the sound quality (when playing mp3's)
> between the xfce and kde environments.
> 
> This distortion is most noticable  when she plays  pop or rock music with lots of bass.
> The best description is perhaps a old hand held transistor radio with the volume on
> max.  (Or perhaps a speaker with it's fabric cone damaged.)
> 
> This distortion is present when using xfmedia or kaffeine in xfce but is
> not "as bad" in the kde environment.

Stupid question: have you checked volume levels?  Xfce generally doesn't
touch your mixer, but KDE might be setting volume levels (to something
that just happens to be more sane) on startup.

> Any ideas as to what the problem might be...?
> Perhaps it be possible to use the kde sound server (arts?) with xfce?
> BTW this basically a Ubuntu (MEPIS) system so no ALSA.

If arts works similarly to esd, then you should just need to start up an
app that uses arts, and the daemon will get started.  I'm not familiar
with kaffeine, but in xfmedia, you can set the output driver used to
'arts' in the preferences dialog.  (Assuming this will solve your
problem, which I'm not convinced it will.)

	-brian