I have an old HP Omnibook 800CT laptop, and am having some trouble
getting quality sound out of ALSA 0.9.0rc6.
System Particulars:
o Distro: Debian 3.0r0 (woody)
o Kernel: 2.4.18; devfs enabled
o Sound chip: ESS1887/1888
o ALSA distro: 0.9.0rc6
Much of my guidance on configuring sound for the HP Omnibook came
from MobiliX's Web page on the subject:
http://mobilix.org/hp800e.html
So. After far more hair-pulling than seemed reasonable, I finally
got ALSA to compile, install, recognize my chip, and make sound. ALSA was
configured as follows:
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-isapnp=yes --with-oss=yes
--with-cards=es18xx,es1688
The successful 'modprobe' command is:
modprobe snd-es18xx port=0x220 mpu_port=0x330 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=5 isapnp=0
'isapnp=0' must be present to disable PnP scanning; otherwise driver
initialization will fail (the chip does not appear in PnP scans).
Although sound samples play intelligibly, the sound quality is not
as good as the kernel-supplied OSS driver ('sb' in this case). There appear
to be three primary problems:
o Straight sample playback using 'aplay' has pops/clicks at regular
intervals (suggesting it might be related to an internal buffer
size).
o At the very end of a sound sample, 'aplay' will "hiccup",
replaying a previous segment of the sample before exiting.
(Almost as if the internal sound buffers had been swapped.)
o Though coming out of both speakers, playback is monaural. It
sounds like left and right channels are being mixed together, and
the result played out both speakers. It also sounds like it's
being low-pass filtered, but I can't verify that.
'xmms' doesn't appear to suffer from the pop/click or "hiccup"
problems, but definitely has the monaural issue. (This is using the ALSA
driver support module for 'xmms'.) All of the above were performed using
native ALSA tools; the OSS compatibility modules were not loaded or used.
By contrast, the 'sb' kernel/OSS module plays stereo fine, and does
not pop/click using SOX's 'play' command, but the "hiccup" is still there.
'xmms' playback is flawless in all cases. Here are the options for the 'sb'
module:
options sb irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5 io=0x220 mpu_io=0x330
Since I have sound working using the old, decrepit OSS drivers, this
isn't a big deal for me, but I'd like to see ALSA working at least as well
as the old stuff. Any and all hints greatly appreciated.
Schwab
-------------------------------------------------------
This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
Welcome to geek heaven.
http://thinkgeek.com/sf
_______________________________________________
Alsa-user mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
