odd sound of broken speaker with distortion

[exgsr]

Hi people..
i'm with dapper and using sblive! value pci sound card
the sound is coming out of my 4.1 speakers.. however its full of above as titled..
played with alsa mixer controls for wave,bass,treble and such.. to no avail..
help..help..
this is currently the only problem that really2 bothering me with my ubuntu ](*,)

[exgsr]

bump.

[LordRaiden]

Play with PCM if you have it, start at 100% then go lower until there is no more distortion. Too low and you'll lose volume.

[SC_Frank]

All -

First post on the Ubuntu site - but I thought I'd share my findings on the distortion issue (and this is with what I'd call a pure Ubuntu install, with no KDE apps or libraries, as far as I can tell - at least no kde processes were running) I've tried 3 sound cards (Audigy 2 ZS, SBLive value & Via on-board). All 3 cards had the same amount and type of distortion (bubbling sound), regardless of the volume settings. I knew about the PCM gain issue, and tried setting all PCM items to 0, except for the primary PCM volume, which I set to about 30-40. I tried playing the files in XMMS, Listen, MPlayer and Banshee. Once again, I was met with the same distortion. This evening, I tried an experiment - I re-ripped a Steely Dan CD using both FLAC and OGG codecs (all my existing music is in MP3 format, and encoded at 192 or higher, and in some cases in VBR). Guess what! - In both OGG and FLAC there was absolutely NO DISTORTION or odd sounds, just clean pure music. I tested these with my Audigy 2 card and using a high-end pair of headphones, so I could pick up anything. After an hour of listening to Two Against Nature, I was impressed. The one thing I did not see in some of the posts regarding this issue (which for me is a big one), was the CODEC used and the bitrate of the songs. So, I'm pretty sure, at least in my case, the CODEC was the issue, not the Alsa drivers. Since hard drive space is not an issue with me, I'd prefer to use FLAC, due to it's cleaness and the fact that it seems to rip/encode extremely fast.

My two cents worth - hope this helps some folks experiencing the sound problems.....

Cheers --