I have experienced effects like those you described when Pulseaudio (or perhaps something else in the audio-processing chain) must do sample-rate conversion, such as from 44.1 KHz to 48KHz, to drive my USB speakers. Sox has been an effective solution for me. Try "play" (a link to sox that denotes output to sound hardware instead of a file) to learn whether sox may offer superior sample-rate conversion that avoids the problems you hear. There are probably a handful of tools that will display information about sound devices. Audacity has a convenient one: Help -> Audio Device Info that displays supported sample rates. For example, I see: Default capture device number: 13 Default playback device number: 13 ============================== Device ID: 0 Device name: ALSA: Bose USB Audio: USB Audio (hw:0,0) Input channels: 0 Output channels: 6 Low Input Latency: -1.000000 Low Output Latency: 0.010667 High Input Latency: -1.000000 High Output Latency: 0.042667 Supported Rates: 48000 ============================== Output like this may display a needed sample rate for your USB sound device (48000 in my case). If you use sox to convert a file to the target rate before you play it, and it then sounds good, this confirms the problem involves resampling. -- test mailing list test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test