Tue Nov 12, 2013 11:11 pm
It does make a difference on my sound card even if the source material is a low sample rate. It's an Asus Xonar Essence ST. On windows, setting the sample rate to 192000 Hz also tells the sound card to do some internal processing which improves the sound quality. Amazingly, setting PulseAudio to 192000 Hz also affects the sound quality. It isn't placebo. There is definitely a HUGE difference, even on youtube videos with a supposed sample rate of 48000 Hz. Whether or not it is enabling the internal processing the same on windows, there is definitely a noticable difference. Although setting pulseaudio to 192000 also taxes my Core 2 Duo, so obviously my sound card is not fully hardware accelerated. I will try to track down a script or something. Maybe there is a way to make two daemon.conf files and switch between them and restart the daemon with a simple script. I'm not a fan of pulseaudio either. I prefer ALSA, but trying to remove pulseaudio and make alsa the default on Ubuntu tends to break things. I really don't have the expertise to switch to a different distro conveniently. I've used Debian before, but I always end up wanting to bang my head against the wall after trying to make something work right. On a side note, one of the most significant things you can edit in daemon.conf is the resample-method. I've found src-sinc-best-quality to be the best setting, but it is also the most processor-demanding setting I believe.