I'm hoping that someone can help me debug my audio problems. The problem is that audio playback is clipped and has low volume. The details of my setup are as follows:
Arch Linux 3.1.3-1
An onboard soundcard (ASUS M4A78LT-M-LE motherboard), identified as Intel HDA in dmesg:
description: Audio device product: SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 14.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:14.2 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=64 resources: irq:16 memory:f9ff4000-f9ff7fff
ALSA (snd_hda_intel driver) and Pulseaudio
My ALSA mixer settings (which were used in the recording shown in this post) are at http://pastebin.com/w7Aw1iPr .
The mixer settings were chosen so that all "dB gain" is 0.00 for all columns in alsamixer.
Recording an MP3 (played at full volume) from the Stereo Mixer source in audacity gives output which looks clipped and has low volume:
This occurs with any MP3 and any other sound source.
The problem does not occur when I boot into Windows XP, so it doesn't seem to be a hardware problem.