On 03/08/2013 11:02 AM, Ben Bell wrote:
Well obviously. Anyone with ears can tell you that.
More importantly, does a vintage kernel sound better than a more recent one?
I've been doing some testing and the results are pretty clear, not that
they should surprise anyone who knows anything about recording:
1) Older kernels sound much warmer than newer ones.
2) Kernels compiled by hand on the machine they run on sound less sterile
than upstream distro provided ones which also tend to have flabby low
end response and bad stereo imaging.
3) As if it needed saying, gcc4 is a disaster for sound quality. I mean,
seriously if you want decent audio and you use gcc4 you may as well be
recording with a tin can microphone.
4) Kernels sound better after they've been worn in a bit. Don't expect your
newly built 2.4 kernel to have that warm sound until you've run with it
for a few weeks, but for a really classy sound here's a trick: compile the
kernel and then put it somewhere safe (ext2 partition, obviously) to mellow
for a month and then boot into it at the last minute before you start
recording an important session. Your clients will thank you.
Ben
I have a couple of NOS kernels stacked, those sound way better than any
kernel built after 2000.
On a serious note, people seriously believe a real-time kernel sounds
better than normal kernels. They also think raising the nrpacks value of
the snd-usb-audio module improves the sound quality of their $2000 USB
DAC. Maybe the latter is true but I have no idea how nrpacks relates to
sound quality.
Jeremy
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