xUbuntu 16.04 no bass and poor sound quality
I have a AsRock motherboard with Realtek ALC892 chipset.
cat /proc/asound/cards
returns
0 [PCH ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
HDA Intel PCH at 0xf7110000 irq 29
1 [NVidia ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
HDA NVidia at 0xf7080000 irq 17
The main thing is that I don't really hear bass on Audacious when playing music. If there's bass, is really low compared with Windows. I've tried loading a Bass and Treble preset from WinAmp using the Equalizer in Audacious and the sound is very bad, like when having a poor speaker on max volume. This happens both on my 2.0 setup or on my headphones.
How can I improve this?
PulseAudio and ALSA are configured for 44.1KHz 16-bit audio by default which is not bad but not really great.
You can check the current configuration with:
$ pacmd list-sinks | grep sample
It will show something like this:
$ pacmd list-sinks | grep sample
sample spec: s16le 2ch 41000Hz
sample spec: s16le 2ch 41000Hz
To change it, we need to edit the PulseAudio's configuration file:
$ nano /etc/pulse/daemon.conf
Find these in the file:
; resample-method = speex-float-1
; default-sample-format = s16le
; default-sample-rate = 44100
Remove the semicolon and change the values to:
resample-method = src-sinc-medium-quality
default-sample-format = s24le
default-sample-rate = 96000
Save the file by pressing Ctrl+O (to save) and Ctrl+X (to exit).
Restart PulseAudio:
$ pulseaudio -k
$ pulseaudio --start
Check the settings again:
$ pacmd list-sinks | grep sample
It should something like this:
$ pacmd list-sinks | grep sample
sample spec: s32le 2ch 96000Hz
sample spec: s32le 2ch 96000Hz
and we are done!
For more info: https://r3dux.org/2013/12/how-to-enable-high-quality-audio-in-linux/