Is it me, or is sound really great on FreeBSD?

poorandunlucky

poorandunlucky

I don't know if it's me or not, but damn... I feel like sound is so much better on FreeBSD than it was on Windows 10... I don't know why, and I couldn't explain it, but it like sound is so much clearer, sharper, more... alive...

The main thing that allows me to think it's not just my imagination is that my subwoofer and speakers don't feel like they're working independently anymore... often, especially on some of my YouTube subscriptions, the sound between the two was definitely split, and kind of hard to understand, and definitely unpleasant, but I'd gotten used to it... Now that problem's gone on all channels... I haven't really listened to any music files yet - I'm still settling in - but I really think sound is awesome on FreeBSD...

I don't really want to think about what was happening before because it makes me sad, but I definitely think sound is vastly superior on FreeBSD... Hell, I was even disappointed at my speakers that are kind of maybe not audiophile quality but that are supposed to be superior to say Logitech speakers without being M-Audio or KRK (they're Edifier Prisma I think... the ones with the haloed remote and pyramid subwoofer), but now I'm very happy with my speakers, and I can say that they are, in fact, quite superior to Logitech speakers...

Quite disappointed at Winderps, there... quite... ,_,

Can reality be fun, sometimes?

Edit: Oh yeah, the channel I was talking about is TopTenz and Today I Found Out (same host), and my favorite channel is Dark5 (which I think some of you guys might like) ^_^
 
Its you. :p

But then again, too much Iron Maiden has done the job on my ears. I have a listened to a $10,000 system and I don't hear the difference. :(
 
You're right. I tried to disable sound correction into Windows 10 but the sound quality is bad. I am using the same headphones for the two OS and sound on FreeBSD is far better.
 
PacketMan said:
Its you. :p

But then again, too much Iron Maiden has done the job on my ears. I have a listened to a $10,000 system and I don't hear the difference. :(
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I've listened to 100,000$ systems and they sounded worse than my desktop speakers... they were installed in stadiums, though... I'm not sure dollar amount on its own is a good metric of sound quality : P
 
dlegrand said:
You're right. I tried to disable sound correction into Windows 10 but the sound quality is bad. I am using the same headphones for the two OS and sound on FreeBSD is far better.
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The Windows audio stack is the worse in the market. You can get good results using ASIO + Foobar, or really good ones using something commercial (and expensive) like Merging Pyramix with its Masscore.
 
I use my Thinkpad X61 as the music source for my vintage stereo using multimedia/xmms to play my digital music library.

sabaaf.png

I have it sitting on a table by my recliner and either use some lightweight headphones or run it through the stereo, but that's its main purpose.
 
I had a similar experience many years ago switching from Linux (ALSA) to FreeBSD. OSS sounded so vastly better that it is unconscionable for me to listen to music on Linux.
 
lebarondemerde said:
The Windows audio stack is the worse in the market. You can get good results using ASIO + Foobar, or really good ones using something commercial (and expensive) like Merging Pyramix with its Masscore.
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You'd imagine the inverse, but it's quite the contrary...

metsuke said:
I had a similar experience many years ago switching from Linux (ALSA) to FreeBSD. OSS sounded so vastly better that it is unconscionable for me to listen to music on Linux.
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I know, right? It's insane how good the sound is...
 
Indeed, on my end the audio system on FreeBSD is just simpler and thus better than it was on any Linux distro i have tried. I could never get the hang of how audio works on a Linux system thanks to its complexity (as can be seen in the picture below).

LXF130.audio.layers.png
 
I saw them doing their Secret Treaties tour. :)

I'm upgrading my X61 from a 100GB to a 250GB HDD right now.
 
I would attribute the differences to the defaults on Windows audio stack vs FreeBSD, and more in general how easy it is to configure either.

Windows, by default, mixes everything down to usually 44100Hz or 48000Hz, and uses particularly disgusting conversion that muddies most sound. You can't get really clear, crisp sound without using bit-perfect output (eg. via ASIO or WASAPI), and there is no way to configure it otherwise.

FreeBSD, however and as usual, uses rather sane defaults. The audio drivers seem to allow greater control over sound signal as well, eg. hw.snd.vpc_0db has a wonderful effect on output; no similar setting even exists on Windows despite how simplistic it is.

You don't even need to enable bit-perfect processing to get acceptable to good audio quality, as the rate conversion ( feeder) settings offers enough granularity and precision as you want it to.
You should read sound(4)() to see what kind of options are available. Don't forget to set dev.pcm.X.play.vchanrate and use sinc interpolation with hw.snd.feeder_rate_quality if you don't use bit-perfect output. If you DO use bit-perfect output, audio/libsoxr is my resampler of choice and really beefs up any sound you throw at it.
 
I uploaded a wav file, don't remember its origin, it's a music sample recorded using just 4 LSB.
It's recommended to use for checking the quality of an audio system. I checked with a couple of computers and phones, but cannot hear it.
In my T430 I can hear it only with mplayer's audio filter increasing volume by 30dB ( mplayer -af volume=30 4lsb.wav, not sure whether it's really 30dB).
 
When I get old and losing my hair, many years from now...

With VPCs and mixing enabled (no bit-perfect), I can hear it fairly clearly using ffplay with vpc_0db set to 1, I can barely hear it at 20, and I keep it on 40-45 for normal usage for this soundcard.
With the speakers I can just barely hear it at 1, but these x220t speakers are only slightly better than most modern laptop speakers...
With my USB DAC I can hear it at max volume at 45.
If I enable bit-perfect output, I hear with the same settings vpc_0db I forgot has no effect when VPC is disabled, but even so it does has a little less static.

I tried playing this on my Windows 7 box, and I couldn't hear it at all through various softwares, even with amplification. With ASIO output in foobar2000 I could just barely hear it at max volume with my DAC.
 
I can clearly hear the difference on a T-420, and I am not an audiophile nor am I a computer/soft expert by any means. Not only it is better via an external DAC, but it is good enough via it's on-board chip: clearly an obvious superiority of the chip driver soft aside from the rest of them variables. The same hardware cries for an external DAC on Windows 7 or Linux. I have also tried KX Studio and AP Linux and I keep coming back to FreeBSD.
Classical music mostly with a modest hardware on the end side of it: either Sennheiser 600 or Vandersteen 2Ci speakers with a vintage Marantz in between.
Thank you very much, developers
 
When doing some C64 SID music, I observed for quite some time it sounds much better in VICE 3.3 on FreeBSD 12 than it does in VICE 3.3 on Windows 10. But then, I use them on different machines, so I assumed it might be the machines themselves or maybe differences in the VICE ports. It never occured to me that the OS might actually have an influence itself ;)

What I can say for sure is: sound on FreeBSD is much better than on Linux, just for technical aspects. A clean OSS interface is much nicer than that ALSA and pulseaudio hell ... ;)
 
I also favor OSS. I use my FreeBSD box for running DAWs, mostly FL Studio. The Included FL ASIO audio plugin works amazingly well, no need for JACK. By increasing the buffer size a bit I can run high-end plugins on an underpowered laptop at ~60% CPU usage. I'm pretty sure they choked a lot in Linux.

Also, there's native support for equalization, whereas in other systems you have to do a lot of shit to get it working proper. The bass and treble controls even show up on audio/wmsmixer with the correct icons:

6914
6916


And then there's the before mentioned sysctl tweak hw.snd.vpc_0db, which acts pretty much like a built-in pre-amp.

It's because of things like these or moused() that I haven't booted into my Linux partition in months.
 
dieselriot said:
I also favor OSS. I use my FreeBSD box for running DAWs, mostly FL Studio. The Included FL ASIO audio plugin works amazingly well, no need for JACK. By increasing the buffer size a bit I can run high-end plugins on an underpowered laptop at ~60% CPU usage. I'm pretty sure they choked a lot in Linux.
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Are you running the Linux version of FL Studio in FreeBSD?
 
sand_man No, I'm running the windoze version through Wine. But it works so well that it feels like I'm running a native FreeBSD application. The interface is, AFAIC, 100% delayless. Even like 95% of the VST plugins I've tested work.
 
I moved a HTPC from Ubuntu to FreeBSD, due to never-ending issues with Pulse Audio. AC-3 / DTS Passthrough broke with every other update and there were enormous audio lags on a low-powered NUC. The issues went so far that some audio tracks showed wow (low-speed flutter) like bad quality cassette players of ages past - likely due to the Linux kernel experiencing various levels of lag and trying to "catch up" if the lag became to big.

With FreeBSD, audio simply worked out of the box, without any of the issues above. Using OSS and SNDIO, but no Pulse.
 
This is why I switched to FreeBSD in the first place. Native OSS and "bitperfect" mode. My vinyl rips sound great! :D
 
tedbell said:
This is why I switched to FreeBSD in the first place. Native OSS and "bitperfect" mode. My vinyl rips sound great! :D
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Rip your vinyl records in flac24 and play that on OSS, not sndio. That lossless form will play a fuller spectrum and higher bitrate of sound from the computer than CD quality. It requires a 24 bit capable sound card/processor to hear the benefits of those sound files. Maybe you have done this already. Flac16 is CD quality. The last time I looked, sndio didn't have 24 bit sound on FreeBSD.
 
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