Linux 5.3 Continues Advancing Intel's Sound Open Firmware

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.3 Continues Advancing Intel's Sound Open Firmware

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai sent in the big set of audio driver changes for Linux 5.3...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.3-Sound-Additions

[JacekJagosz]

The CX2072X patches have been ready and working for 3 years, just haven't been mainlained. As a user I'm mad that it took so long, but oh well, at least they are here.

[cl333r]

Speaking of sound, anyone knows how to fix: the speech audio is quiet in movies but all other sounds are like 3x louder (tested with mpv & VLC). On Windows 10 on VLC I have the same issue, but in KMPlayer the sound is fine.

PS: I heard it's because some movies' sounds are designed for theatres and some desktop players somehow recognize this and mitigate it.

[juno]

Speaking of sound, anyone knows how to fix: the speech audio is quiet in movies but all other sounds are like 3x louder (tested with mpv & VLC). On Windows 10 on VLC I have the same issue, but in KMPlayer the sound is fine.

PS: I heard it's because some movies' sounds are designed for theatres and some desktop players somehow recognize this and mitigate it.

It is common for movies to have a quite high dynamic range in audio volume. I think it's likely that what you hear is the "correct", original sound and you have a compressor enabled in KMPlayer. Sometimes also called normalizer.

[uid313]

This Intel Sound Open Firmware is amazing!
I would really love to see Intel do an open firmware for network too.

[evil_core]

Speaking of sound, anyone knows how to fix: the speech audio is quiet in movies but all other sounds are like 3x louder (tested with mpv & VLC). On Windows 10 on VLC I have the same issue, but in KMPlayer the sound is fine.

PS: I heard it's because some movies' sounds are designed for theatres and some desktop players somehow recognize this and mitigate it.

The possible reason is that pulseaudio (or mapleyr) is using multichannel playback, when you have only stereo connected(missing additional channels). Even for stereo soundtracks PulseAudio is muting speech(by frequency) on satelites and puts it on central speaker(which is missing in your setup).

If you got multichannel setup, then my guess is that central speaker is swapped with subwoofer(which filter's out mid-to-high freqs), sp speech is muted. You can fix it in multiple ways, by changing connections physically, in PulseAudio or alsa config(sometimes it's even available in alsamixer [on old creative cards].

[andrei_me]

I have issues with my headphone jack on my laptop, it is only working on one side of the speakers.

http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=404b886b127ab0dc26e2b758ad2bb92e98bff858