I'm trying to setup a pulseaudio based WLAN audio stream and while debugging quality problems, I noticed that even playing a local WAV file using paplay
results in a playback with quality problems in the form of sporadic stuttering and a continuous background noise.
I tried it with both, a Raspberry Model B+ and a Raspberry 2, using multiple Raspbian versions (2013-09-25-wheezy-raspbian
, 2015-05-05-raspbian-wheezy
and 2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie
) and various Pulseaudio versions - almost everything from 2.0 to a 7.1 freshly compiled from source.
After days of tinkering I'm only left with the impression that Pulseaudio must be somehow fundamentelly flawed on the Pi. Using MPD on the Raspberry or paplay on my Ubuntu based notebook results in crystal clear playback using the same WAV file.
I also find it very discouraging to notice that the sound quality and the stability of the remote sink seems to get worse with every more recent version of pulseaudio.
Any thoughts on this? Has anyone the same problem or could be so kind to try the steps below to reproduce the problem?
Steps to reproduce (in case of a fresh raspbian install):
apt-get install pulseaudio
reboot
wget https://archive.org/download/onclassical-quality-wav-audio-files-of-classical-music/onclassical_demo_demicheli_geminiani_pieces_allegro-in-f-major_small-version.wav -O test.wav
paplay test.wav
aplay
, might be wrong). Sometimes, probably due to codecs, you need to use a different programs for different formats, so you could try MP3 etcaplay
indeed plays the WAW smooth, but still with noticeable static noise on the PI.