Stupid simple tweak to improve Pulseaudio audio quality

General system Community contributions
41

@shmu26
Are you a necromantic?
This thread is ancient!
How have all now usually Pipewire!#ä#
Every modern chip should be able to do that!
24 bit and 32,000 Khz are set by default. Unless the material doesn’t give it,.
If that’s what you’re using and that’s set by default.
Then look here;
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Troubleshooting
Point 5.1.9

mkdir $HOME/.config/pipewire/
cp /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf $HOME/.config/pipewire/
nano $HOME/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf

Open and navigate to about line 70.
resample.quality = 5

stream.properties = {
    #node.latency          = 1024/48000
    #node.autoconnect      = true
     resample.quality      = 5
    #channelmix.normalize  = false
    #channelmix.mix-lfe    = true
    #channelmix.upmix      = true
    #channelmix.upmix-method = psd  # none, simple
    #channelmix.lfe-cutoff = 150
    #channelmix.fc-cutoff  = 12000
    #channelmix.rear-delay = 12.0
    #channelmix.stereo-widen = 0.0
    #channelmix.hilbert-taps = 0
    #dither.noise = 0
}

Higher values than 10 are misleading.

I personally lowered to “5”. A good mix of artifacts and the pressure from error correction.

42

We do have pipewire nowadays, but we still have pulse. The tweaks worked for me on both my updated Manjaro and on my Ubuntu 22.04.
Unfortunately, with the Manjaro, which was Plasma, I started suffering from random freezes.

43

Interestingly, the Pipewire wiki claims that you don’t need to do this tweak:

PipeWire uses a custom highly optimized and reasonably accurate resampler. See Infinite Wave for a comparison. Changing the quality uses more CPU power with (arguably) little measurable advantages.

44

I can’t find such a file on my EOS system. :thinking:
Therefore I assume that you have copied this file from system to system. I can also imagine that Pulse still responds to it but whether that makes sense? Pipewire always tries to automatically achieve the best possible depending on the system load.

In any case, the playground is still there.
Even if you have dug up an ancient thread, I tried with interest yesterday. :rofl:

I just think that the settings are only useful if you have appropriate hardware connected like a PC speaker set or a DAC or send the signal through a HiFi amplifier.
With the small plastic speakers in a laptop will not be detectable.