Solved FreeBSD vs Linux sound quality

  • Thread starter Deleted member 63539
  • Start date
D

Deleted member 63539

Guest
I used to hear on this forums many things about sound on FreeBSD and Linux. Most of them are sound on FreeBSD is superior, OSS vs ALSA/PulseAudio... But today after I tried to play Supertux2 on both FreeBSD and Linux (MX Linux), I have a very different conclusion. The sound on Linux is more round and more warm. I'm not a professional in sound and just a normal user with a cheap headphone/speaker but I simply found the sound on Linux is much better than FreeBSD. The sound on FreeBSD, IMHO, just louder... but nothing else. And it hurts my ears.

On Linux, I just use the graphical frontend to control the sound. On FreeBSD, as no graphical frontend works, I use mixer to control the sound. I didn't do anything special other than increase the volume to 100% on both Linux and FreeBSD. On Linux via the Volume icon on the System tray. On FreeBSD, via mixer -s vol 100.

Disclaimer: It's just my own experience and my own opinion and I didn't want to start a flame war. Please don't give me comments like "Let's just use Linux!". It's simply a report but nothing else.

Update: Following this definition, the sound on Linux is warm for me and the sound on FreeBSD is really bright! Maybe the sound quality on FreeBSD used to be better than Linux, but it's the past, and it no longer true now.
 
It depends of the player you're using too, deadbeef is my main player for music and it sound great on FreeBSD, vlc quality is not that good IMHO but there's also some tweaks out there for the sound quality for example to maintain the same sample rate of the sound file you're using etc Try out deadbeef and tell if you liked!

Greetings
 
Record the playing sound on both devices, i.e. Linux and FreeBSD with Audacity or some other program. Then import the recording separately into Audacity and take a screenshot of Waveform/Spectrogram view. If we have this graphical representation, it's easier for us to understand what is going on and how do you receive the final audio. P.S. I can't remember from top of my head how to record your desktop sound with Audacity, but there are tutorials on the net.
[EDIT] I need something like this: audacityteam.org | Spectrogram View
[EDIT 2] If you want to proceed this experiment, please make sure you are playing same song with exact/matching mixer settings in both system, to get a fair comparison. thanks.
 
I had always heard from the Linux crowd of their complaint that sound was better on FreeBSD. Just last week I read that one of their distros was making a change that allowed OSS on it and they were jumping for joy.

So I think it might just be settings somewhere.
 
  • Like
Reactions: a6h
Record the playing sound on both devices, i.e. Linux and FreeBSD with Audacity or some other program. Then import the recording separately into Audacity and take a screenshot of Waveform/Spectrogram view. If we have this graphical representation, it's easier for us to understand what is going on and how do you receive the final audio. P.S. I can't remember from top of my head how to record your desktop sound with Audacity, but there are tutorials on the net.
[EDIT] I need something like this: audacityteam.org | Spectrogram View
[EDIT 2] If you want to proceed this experiment, please make sure that you are playing same song with exact matching mixer in both system, to get a fair comparison. thanks.
I can't access your link. There is some CloudFlare hCaptcha thing I tried many times but it didn't let me go.
It's the song played by Supertux2 when playing and the sound when you kill mobs and collect money, it varies between worlds and levels but I could play the same level and world on both platform to test.
I don't know about that much but the sound on Linux is just better. You could easily test by downloading MX Linux live iso, create a live usb, boot into the live system, and install supertux2 by apt. One of the awesomeness of Linux is it ability to serve as a live system!
 
I had always heard from the Linux crowd of their complaint that sound was better on FreeBSD. Just last week I read that one of their distros was making a change that allowed OSS on it and they were jumping for joy.

So I think it might just be settings somewhere.
Evidence? Yeah, I know it's ridiculous when I didn't upload the spectrogram myself but ask other for evidence. But I think it's very unlikely for your story to be true.
 
Not only the sound is better, the game play is also better on Linux. But it's not enough to said Linux is better than FreeBSD for playing games. I could only said this particular game is played better on Linux than FreeBSD. Given the fact the game is about Tux, the Linux mascot, it's nothing strange if it's optimized for Linux more than other platforms.

The sound on Linux is just better so I'm just report it to be better. Other Linux users are free to embrace OSS and I don't care.
 
I used to hear on this forums many things about sound on FreeBSD and Linux. Most of them are sound on FreeBSD is superior, OSS vs ALSA/PulseAudio... But today after I tried to play Supertux2 on both FreeBSD and Linux (MX Linux), I have a very different conclusion. The sound on Linux is more round and more warm.

"Superior" in this context means better latency or less glitches. OSS is not capable of applying any effects to the sound itself; ALSA doesn't do anything as well, at least by default; I'm not aware what processing PulseAudio does.

Also, is Supertux 2 some kind of gold standard of audio quality now? You owe yourself trying at least a few more applications.
 
It's the song played by Supertux2 when playing and the sound when you kill mobs and collect money
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with that game. The last game I'd played on PC was Quake II(=2).
You could easily test by downloading MX Linux live iso, create a live usb, boot into the live system, and install supertux2 by apt. One of the awesomeness of Linux is it ability to serve as a live system!
Sorry but I don't play video games, I prefer to play with cats. And beside that, instead of giving me a pair of spectrograms of your output sound, ......... suggesting to download/Install Linux and some games to solve your problem, ......... while(1) printf("WOW ");
 
"Superior" in this context means better latency or less glitches.
These are the criteria when talking about quality. Talking about "round and warm" are personal preferences and thus a matter of taste.

If you have got an excellent hearing and still have it you may try to tweek /etc/sysctl.conf
Code:
kern.timecounter.alloweddeviation=0 realtime!
hw.usb.uaudio.buffer_ms=2 for usb audio devices
hw.snd.latency=0
dev.pcm.0.bitperfect=1
 
A few years ago I compared the sound quality of FreeBSD and Linux (I used SuSE Linux, IIRC) using mp3 files, and there was no difference whatsoever.

Note that you have to disable sound post-processing if you want to make a fair comparison. On FreeBSD, the equalizer is disabled by default, but some features like channel mixing, virtual channels and resampling can change the audio data as well. So be sure to disable virtual channels and enable “bitperfect” mode. See the snd(4) manual page for details; there are quite a few loader tunables and sysctl settings. For the Linux distro that you’re using, please refer to its documentation. The Linux sound driver also supports resampling, equalizer, loudness compression and other things. Which of these are enabled by default depends on the distribution, so be sure to switch all of that off. I don’t remember if Linux also has a “bitperfect” or “bitexact” mode – if it does, switch it on.

As others have mentioned, using a game for testing such things is probably not the best idea, because the game itself might behave differently on different platforms. It’s better to use high-quality audio files for comparison (pcm, flac, wav, mp3 with high bitrate), and use a simple playback program like audio/mpg123, for example.
 
Sorry but I don't play video games, I prefer to play with cats. And beside that, instead of giving me a pair of spectrograms of your output sound, ......... suggesting to download/Install Linux and some games to solve your problem, ......... while(1) printf("WOW ");
I found out the problem. The Supertux2 on my MX Linux is 0.6.0 but the Supertux2 on my FreeBSD is 0.6.2. I think it's just minor version so they will not much different. It turned out to be wrong: https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux/releases

When I listen carefully high definition MV on youtube I found the sound is no different at all. So neither FreeBSD nor Linux has better sound quality.

p/s: it's lucky for me since I found out the problem and don't have to upload the spectrogram. I admit I installed audacity but still have no idea how to record the sound. The user interface is a mess IMHO. And I'm a loyal user of SMTube/SMPlayer, I will not try your deadbeef :)
 
I admit that it is difficult for women to experiment with wind directions.
Feel free to ask for more if still necessary.
Nope. Still do not understand but will not ask more. My English is too bad.
 
They mean a direction modulating effect of airflow upon excreted bodily fluid leads to a subsequent skin contact with said fluid, which is perceived by the nervous system as a localized change in temperature (in comparison to air).
 
When I listen carefully high definition MV on youtube I found the sound is no different at all. So neither FreeBSD nor Linux has better sound quality.
You didn't get the point what sound quality means. See above.
Codecs used can diminish sound quality. Using YT for benchmarking sound quality is no good method.
 
You didn't get the point what sound quality means. See above.
Codecs used can diminish sound quality. Using YT for benchmarking sound quality is no good method.
What? I watched the same MV with 4K quality on both systems. So I have to choose 8K quality? My system can't render 8K! I think the higher the video quality, the higher the audio quality, too. Isn't it?
 
Back
Top