Quote Originally Posted by bitwarrior
I have an on-board VIA sound AC'97 and since VIA hasn't released drivers for the kernel of knoppix 3.2 so i installed ALSA... but now CD's sound perfect and MP3's and wavs have some crazy buzzing noise in the speakers...
I think it has to do with the way that interrupts are handled under Linux, and also how much capacitor bypassing is on the board (even on-board discrete sound chips are affected by this second factor to some extent). Be aware that AC '97 sound (a now-7-year-old standard, note) is ENTIRELY handled by the CPU -- the chipset only provides the interface circuitry. This is a failing of AC '97, not Linux -- remember that MS helped design that standard, and that your system (even a fast one) takes a tremendous performance hit as a result of sucking up CPU cycles. Even a cheap OEM SoundBlaster Live! card will both sound better AND improve performance. CD sound is basically just passed through, so it's not affected.