improving sound

[Chris Mohler]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 12:36 PM, norman <norman at littletank.org> wrote:
> I would like to improve both the volume and quality of sound from my
> Inspiron 1525 and still be able to carry the machine around with me. Is
> it possible to achieve this, please? I am running Ubuntu 8.04.

Hi Norman,

On my Dell Vostro 1500 sound was working "out of the box", but not
very well.  In my case, some of the sound channels were "hidden" and
turned down.  There are two ways around this (that I know of):

The GUI way (in Gnome)
1. Double-click the volume-slider applet in the panel
2. Select Edit->Preferences
3. Turn on some of the unchecked channels (for me it was either PCM or
Front - don't remember)
4. Close the dialog, then crank up the volume on the extra channels

The TUI way
1. Open a terminal and type 'alsamixer' and press enter
2. Scroll to the left and right with arrow keys, increase volume with
up/down arrow keys.  Keep going all the way past the right-most -
sometimes there are even more channels.

If that doesn't work, we probably need to know what sound card you
have.  Type 'lspci' in a terminal and paste the output back here.

Chris