improving sound

[Chris Mohler]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 2:50 AM, norman <norman at littletank.org> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Thank you, I tried your suggestion and the volume improved.

No problem.  As far as quality goes, my laptop's built-in speakers are
a bit 'wimpy'.  I generally use headphones or external speakers...

Chris