December 16, 2023

Fedora 39 -- sound after full reinstall

It just works.

I expected all kinds of misery, but actually was blessed with good news.
My onboard sound "just works" -- sorta -- see below. I ultimately abandoned it.

I had been using an inexpensive little USB sound dongle (marked "SIIG USB Soundwave 7.1"). It has been serving me well for quite some time amid various issues with linux sound. I'll put it away where I can find it if I ever need it again, and in the meanwhile be happy that I have an extra USB slot (actually two since this thing tended to block a nearby slot).

Pavucontrol

There used to be an XFCE mixer. It is gone, worse than deprecated. The replacement is "pavucontrol", which seems just fine.

It informs me when I plug my speaker into the green "line out" and indicates that it is using GP108 high definition audio.

And it works!

Is it plugged in?

Sound was not working at first. It turned out I had accidentally hit the switch on my power strip during the upgrade and disk swap. Once I turned it on, voila! Sound. A hint was that pavucontrol was showing a nicely pulsing sound bar graph as I played a Youtube video. So I could see the sound, but not hear it.

Sound regression - February 22, 2024

After 2 months with the onboard sound, I have grown less and less satisfied. When I turn up the level, it gets harsh (I think it is clipping), yet the level is inadequate. I would say somebody has put some gain in the wrong place, too early in the game. The second problem is that certain Youtube videos have sound levels that are just too low for me to hear. You might argue that they should fix their videos, but that simply isn't going to happen and I want to hear what is being said.

So I got my little USB dongle and plugged it in. Much much better! No distortion and it provides clean sound at a level that doesn't demand that I turn up the volume on my speakers to the max.

I run XFCE and in the menu under settings I found "pulseaudio volume control". I brought this up before plugging in the "soundwave" dongle. When I plug it in the GUI actually adds a section it labels CM102-A+/102S+ Audio Controller. It has a volume slider that I can move all the way to "153", but I find that the default setting of "100" works just fine.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]