All of the above work with Pulse + Pipewire.
What tweak could be done to improve MX’s sound output?
Last time, had MX install on BTRFS instead of ext4.
Could this have had an impact on sound quality?
I doubt it.
More likely
- tuning… all the fiddles in pulseaudio or whatever
- packages … MX may be not as uptodate as other distros because of its Debian base.
I dont know audio but I am sure someone can give you some details
AFAIK, MX has recently updated to latest Debian Bookworm.
What gets me, is Spiral’s version, not yet updated to that version and has just as good a sound output as latest KDE Neon.
Neon is Ubuntu based … its packages could be ahead of Debian, I think.
Spiral is Debian stable, but it has backports of drivers… so it could be newer too.
You can add backports to MX… or is it testing? … see the Package Manager GUI
Dont forget your tuning.
Perhaps take a look at the alsa settings?
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" Unlike Debian’s official install media, SpiralLinux includes non-free firmware. It also provides popular media codecs out of the box. "
Do you perhaps need to look at codecs?
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Think you’re onto something there chap! 
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When you find out, let us all know.
I would be very interested in your results. I just got a 5.1 system added to my MX Linux laptop and have had a heck of time getting anything to adjust the sound. The Pulse Effects equalizer has no place for any adjustments. I am not a sound pro, but seems there should be some type of equalizer to tweak the sounds in MX Linux.
Thanks,
Sheila Flanagan
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Have tried a few things over the years.
Equalizer extensions for Firefox or Vivaldi aren’t that bad.
Pulse Effects … naw.
JamesDSP for Linux is good and getting better, but not ready for prime time.
–Release JamesDSP for Linux v2.6.1 · Audio4Linux/JDSP4Linux · GitHub
–Release JamesDSP for Linux v2.6.1 · Audio4Linux/JDSP4Linux · GitHub
Neville Jackson won’t like me for this, but i’m back to Windows 11 with FXSound as default sound app. A no-brainer for now. Just haven’t had the time to push into a deeper investigation on the Linux side of things. If anything, at present time, will be content with SpiralLinux and hopefully push for the answer there.
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Its fine Daniel. I cant really help… know nothing about sound.
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Hi Daniel,
I understand you perfectly.
In my case, since I like to work with DAWs, Digital Audio Workstations, and plugins, on Windows I only had to worry about installing the USB audio interface drivers and programs, the programs and plugins and all the time I wasted “playing with the programs”.
On Linux… Well, for all the time I’ve been using Linux, and also because I wanted to do away with Windows for audio and have a debian system just for that purpose that I’ve configured myself, I’ve yet to find out when I won’t waste time with configurations or errors and will be able to spend my time just “playing with the programs”.
This isn’t a complaint, on the contrary, it just demonstrates the freedom we have in Linux, to configure everything the way we want, but as I’m a noobie to this, I have to study a lot to know how to configure and, most of the time, the errors are caused by me.
As I have Windows on another partition, and one of the DAWs I have is licensed for both Windows and Linux, I often think about switching to Windows just to “play with audio”, but then I think about it and Linux is… LINUX!
I think everyone understands me.
There must have been times, if only because they’d never seen Linux used before and made the first “big mistake” for a newbie, that they must have thought "what am I doing here? The Windows partition is even working and “calling for me”, but in the end, we’re all here wanting to keep Linux running because we’re “Linux lovers”.
Now an off the record:
Some of you may have read that I bought a Mini PC to use as a server, but as my wife’s PC was very old, I gave the Mini PC to her. It came with Windows 11 installed.
I’d never seen Windows 11 before and I don’t know what I did, but during the update process, I must have done something so badly that Windows never worked again, not even in recovery.
So I had to install Windows 11, install the updates, install programs and personal files. It took me about a total of 24 hours. I was completely furious and all I could think was “if she’d let me, I’d install Linux now, because I can’t see Windows in front of me!”
Conclusion
I would never switch to Linux, even with all the problems it might have, even if I think that Windows is “right next door”.
Sorry to all users for this off topic
Jorge
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