iMac Late 2009 audo is flat

[fatjackdurham]

Hi. I have loaded GhostBSD on my iMac (late 2009). I am running FreeBSD 12.2-STABLE FreeBSD 12.2-STABLE GENERIC amd64 running MATE.

Everything has been easy so far, but when I play music through youtube with either firefox or chromium, that sound is flat and shrill, as though someone has turned down all the base EQ settings and turned up the midrange.

I've been poking around the FreeBSD handbook and this forum looking for answers and the closest I came was the Parametric EQ post, but I am not sure that's correct. I put the hint.pcm.0.eq in the loader.conf, but it didn't fix the problem and i haven't made any other changes.

dmesg shows this:
pcm0: <Cirrus Logic CS4206 (Internal Analog 4.0/2.0)> at nid 10,11 and 13 on hdaa0
pcm1: <Cirrus Logic CS4206 (Rear Analog)> at nid 9 and 12 on hdaa0
pcm2: <Cirrus Logic CS4206 (Rear Digital)> at nid 16 and 15 on hdaa0
pcm3: <NVIDIA MCP7A (Digital)> at nid 5 on hdaa1

Does anyone have any hints on what needs to be done to get better sound quality? I compared it to the regular MacOS running on the box and the speakers definitely can make better sound. I just wonder if I have just some generic settngs somewhere that can be tweaked, but the handbook makes it sound like there isnt much to do. It seems more about making sound work, not work well.

Thanks. Oh, yeah, obviously new to FreeBSD> I tried loading some other snd drivers from the boot/kernel directory with kldload, but not different.

[fatjackdurham]

I found this https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2409016 Which seems to describe the issue I am having, but I installing alsa mixer didn't fix it. I notice the alsa mixer shows the sound card as this:



Card: FreeBSD/OSS
Chip: FreeBSD/OSS

So, based on the ubuntu posting, it seems the current driver I am using isn't enabled for all speakers maybe? Any ideas how to enable the base speakers too?

[ericbsd]

Can you give us the output of cat /dev/sndstat, sysctl hw.snd.default_unit and mixer commands?

[fatjackdurham]

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teve@steve-ghostbsd-pc ~> cat /dev/sndstat
Installed devices:
pcm0: <Cirrus Logic CS4206 (Internal Analog 4.0/2.0)> (play/rec) default
pcm1: <Cirrus Logic CS4206 (Rear Analog)> (play/rec)
pcm2: <Cirrus Logic CS4206 (Rear Digital)> (play/rec)
pcm3: <NVIDIA MCP7A (Digital)> (play)
No devices installed from userspace.

steve@steve-ghostbsd-pc ~> sysctl hw.snd.default_unit 
hw.snd.default_unit: 0

steve@steve-ghostbsd-pc ~> mixer
Mixer vol      is currently set to  75:75
Mixer bass     is currently set to  50:50
Mixer treble   is currently set to  50:50
Mixer pcm      is currently set to  91:91
Mixer rec      is currently set to  81:81
Mixer monitor  is currently set to  67:67
Recording source: monitor

[ericbsd]

you can put your base up by doing

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mixer bass 80

[fatjackdurham]

Thanks. That seems to correlate to the actions of both the aumix and the alsa-mixer. I can see the settings changing but the sound doesn't.

As I discovered in the other link I posted to the Ubuntu forums, it seems as though the driver isn't playing to all the speakers. Does anyone know more about making sure I am using the correct audio driver, or how to look more closely at driver settings? The other post implied the option to turn on Surround. I am not sure how I would do that.

[fatjackdurham]

I further investigated, I poked at sysctl settings, and tried to load the snd_hda driver, but it didn't work.

I am wondering if the snd_hda driver is being used. IN alsa mixer it lists the card as FreeBSD/OSS. Is that a driver or just the FreeBSD Sound framework?

In my MacOS, it definitely lists the card as Intel HD Audio. SO, how do I know it's using the right driver? KLDSTAT shows no drivers, and the FreeBSD handbook indicates that snd_hda gets loaded automatically, as does snd_CSA.

[ericbsd]

Most of the sound drivers are already loaded.

[fatjackdurham]

How does it choose which to use, and can I specify which to use? since the kernal modules for snd_hda and snd_csa are both load, how can I specify which to use? I figure it must be some setting in sysctl or some config file somewhere, instead of having it make it's own choice, can I tell it what to use?

[ericbsd]

You can run sysctl -A | grep hda and sysctl -A | grep csa same with dmesg.

You can unload a driver by adding this in /boot/loader.conf:

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snd_hda_load="NO"