I have a budget PC and edifier r1280t bookshelf speakers. From day 1 of building my PC about 6 months ago, I was using fedora. I also have a MacBook pro and soon I realised that the speakers sound much better when connected to MacBook pro. I always thought maybe my motherboard dac is not good enough to drive these speakers. But few days ago I installed windows 11 on separate disk as I have some work with windows and I immediately observed that the speakers also sound very good with my PC on windows. What can I do to improve sound quality on fedora? I connect the speakers directly to motherboard I/O at the back which reads “line out” in fedora
OS: fedora 38 CPU: 4600g GPU: rx 580 16GB RAM Motherboard: ASRock b450m
Windows and MacOS probably do some EQ by default.
Easyeffects is great, or use the eq built in to pipewire to avoid an additional dependency: wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Systemwide_parametric_equalization
I think this additional dependency wont bother 90% of the people. Agree on EasyEffects
Will try it.
Let me know your results.
What do you mean by “better”? Sound is very subjective, can you try to be more specific?
I definitely recommend a blind test, the power of expectations can be overwhelming when judging audio
Yup. People often start fussing over bit depths and sample rates, but more often than not it’s something as simple as a difference in volume.
It is going to be difficult to troubleshoot without understanding what is lacking in sound quality between Linux and Windows.
What songs are you comparing with? Use the same set of songs on Windows and Linux.
I can probably look this up if nobody knows but what kind of sound chip is on the ASRock b450m? (Just in case there are some features the Linux driver isn’t making use of for who knows what reason).
You may want to play around with alsamixer. Some audio cards have really low volume on some of the mixers like PCM out of the box on Linux.
For a lot of people, louder audio subjectively means better sounding audio. (Loudness wars for audio mastering for example.)
Is the bit depth configured the same? Sample rate? Is the content the same? Are you using overamplification? Are your channels configured correctly?
I had problems with my bookshelf because when I switch to Linux too.
I had static, audio drop off, volume issues, bad quality.
If you want good sound off of Linux then you have to develop a deep intimate understanding of pulse audio and ALSA. It’s very hard to share the problems that you’re having with audio on web forums, so there’s not much help you can get here. I spent good month or two kicking pulse audio until it worked, you might have to go through the same.
I use a Topping DX1 DAC with Fedora for sending sound to my soundbar. It’s great.
What you mean is the DAC in the MacBook sounds better than the DAC in your PC. Try using a different DAC and see if things get better.
No. They said it’s fine on windows.
You’re right, I missed that. OP needs better Linux drivers for their Edifiers.
