What's With The Sound Quality?, i'm sure our Z's can do better than this Options

[Dromede]

in the beginning, there was the Sharprom...it's music player was quite good, the sound was crisp and loud...but there was little bass response. and since it doesn't have an equalizer the problem could not be fixed. Then there was the PdaXrom which gave us Xmms... well, im here to discuss about the crappy sounds emanating from my (quality)headphones driven by Xmms. as i said the sound is crappy, apparently unbalanced and there is no way of fixing that since xmms equalizer doesnt work on our Z's. fine, i said to myself...just install some other player that has a working equalizer. So i hit the forums...And end up being seriously dissapointed....

apparently there is no music player with an acceptable working equ AFAIK.
Which is kind of strange 'cos it seems that our Z's sound chips(wolfson WM8750) have basic equ capabilities which can be seen on this link:

http://staging.wolfsonmicro.com/products/WM8750/

I also remember reading somewhere that our Z's have the same DAC as ipod's do, can anyone confirm/negate that?

So what's the problem? is it so hard to make a software interface to existing hardware dsp capabilities? And why doesn't xmms equ work?

[pelrun]

Hmm. Things appear to be going somewhat pear-shaped with my Z since I flashed the new kernel.

When I try listening to more than a few minutes of music in xmms my Z gets very confused. Everything slows down as if the Z is under heavy load; the audio breaks up, and the Z starts flashing the IDE access light... even though I'm not using anything from my microdrive, and even when all the partitions on it are unmounted. Additionally I can see the battery level in mb-applet-powerctrl start to plummet.

At that point, I have to force a reboot by pulling the battery; a graceful shutdown hangs when it tries to shut down the CF devices.

I was using the 3100 pdaXrom fastfpe kernel; I'll try the stock beta3 kernel and the nwfpe one and see if I can replicate it there.

Edit: ok, I forgot I've now got a swap partition, which explains the CF behaviour. But that still leaves something unidentified leaking memory until even basic operations trigger page faults. Can't seem to get it to happen again with the nwfpe kernel; will keep investigating.

[Meanie]

Hmm. Things appear to be going somewhat pear-shaped with my Z since I flashed the new kernel.

When I try listening to more than a few minutes of music in xmms my Z gets very confused. Everything slows down as if the Z is  under heavy load; the audio breaks up, and the Z starts flashing the IDE access light... even though I'm not using anything from my microdrive, and even when all the partitions on it are unmounted. Additionally I can see the battery level in mb-applet-powerctrl start to plummet.

At that point, I have to force a reboot by pulling the battery; a graceful shutdown hangs when it tries to shut down the CF devices.

I was using the 3100 pdaXrom fastfpe kernel; I'll try the stock beta3 kernel and the nwfpe one and see if I can replicate it there.

Edit: ok, I forgot I've now got a swap partition, which explains the CF behaviour. But that still leaves something unidentified leaking memory until even basic operations trigger page faults. Can't seem to get it to happen again with the nwfpe kernel; will keep investigating.

i've been using the nwfpe kernel and not had any problems so far... still testing further but the sound quality has improved dramatically!

[adf]

Re pelrun's issue-- I've been using the fastfpe kernel for a couple of days -- no noticeable problem.
Though I suppose if the nwfpe kernel is more precise, maybe I should switch anyway, as there should be no performance difference? Is there any functional difference between nwfpe and fastfpe in pdax (given the lack of hardfloat requirements anyway)?

[eviLjazz]

Re pelrun's issue-- I've been using the fastfpe kernel for a couple of days -- no noticeable problem.

Okay, thanks for the feedback. Back when I was testing both kernels on pdaXii13 I experienced no problems either. I tested each one for several hours.
I haven't had a chance to return to pdaXii13 yet. Will do so on Friday when I'm compiling and testing Quasar on it. I've already changed it to compile against Qt3 and it is working on OS X in X11. So, not much left to do to finally get it working on pdaXrom/pdaXii13...

Though I suppose if the nwfpe kernel is more precise, maybe I should switch anyway, as there should be no performance difference? Is there any functional difference between nwfpe and fastfpe in pdax (given the lack of hardfloat requirements anyway)?

If you're running plain pdaXrom there won't be any performance benefit at all. Things change if you plan to use a chrooted Debian inside pdaXrom. The performance increase is noticeable for pretty much all Debian binaries that do FP ops.