Audio on Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 sucks

It took a Shure SE420 headphones to find out that the Azalia codec that comes with the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 sucks. Ok, now I think my Sennheiser HD595 is tad poorer in performance compared to the Shure SE420. I’ll talk about that next time.

Recently, I managed to get my MP3 encoding to work on my Ubuntu 6.10. Hey, I’m busy too. So I started to rip some of my CDs through my Linux box. When I listened to the music on my Shure SE420, I thought that the music was hallowing. At first I thought my Shure headphones were faulty, and started this whole exercise in trying out my headphones through a standalone CD player, an amplifier, my MacBook, my MP3 player, and finally MP3 music encoded through different computers.

It was the different encodings through the computers that finally helped me to isolate the problem down to the Linux box.

So I tried different CD players on my Linux box, and I found out that 2 of my old CD players are spoilt. Hmm… hardware don’t keep well if you don’t use them for a long time. Finally, I stripped out an old Creative Soundblaster 128bit sound card and slotted it onto my Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, and disabled the Azalia codec through the BIOs setup. Remember to connect the audio in-out cable from your CD player to the sound card. Oh glorious music!!!

Creative Technology delivers! Back to re-ripping some of my CDs, and nursing of my aching back… testing of hardware is a tiring job.