Notices

Originally Posted by sony123

While testing the pulseaudio packages, I also did some comparison with nice and audio quality setting.

- Pulseaudio package

After more A-B tests, the updated pulseaudio package didn't really do the trick for me. I feel the behavior of this package is finicky and less predictable. But it obvious works in certain scenarios and also for many people so maybe it's an isolated case for me.

- Audio quality

CPU % (playing mp3)
speex-fixed-2 (Default): 4-6
speex-fixed-5 : 8-10
speex-fixed-6 : 10-12
speex-fixed-10 : 18-20

So is the quality really better? I would say yes, the difference is definitely noticeable.
The higher the index, the smoother the music is. Overall, cranking up the index gives a "warmer" sound.
I didn't listen carefully to the difference among 4, 5 and 6. But I have the impression that 6 has significant better sound than 2 while the cpu load is acceptable. The value 4 doesn't produce enough improvement to justify the increased cpu load.
In the end, I use 5 just as a compromise.

- Nice setting

Nice setting is more effective to alleviate the stuttering in my case. But it seems to work better with the stock package. Still, there's no guarantee that stuttering will not occur. Need to experiment more, but I'm sticking with -15 for now.


* The pulseaudio daemon setting is configured through /etc/pulse/daemon.conf. Btw, don't bother trying speex-float and src-sinc-xxx, they don't work (no sound) at all.

Originally Posted by optimaxxx

J
If you're still getting subpar audio performance, ensure Dobby surround sound is OFF, counter-intuitive, but the surround sound severely reduced the sound-depth.