Esound: poor quality playback of certain wavfiles

[Andrew Post <apost cbmi upmc edu>]

Hi,

Certain wavfiles are played with very poor quality when played through
esound. I've experienced this with esdplay, xmms (with the esd plugin),
and timidity++ (which converts the midi files to wav). What I mean is,
there is a lot of distortion in the high frequency ranges. I've attached
a sample wav to show you what I mean. Try playing it through esdplay,
then try playing it with something that doesn't use esdplay (like the
play command that comes with Redhat)...what a difference! When I first
installed Mandrake, I was surprised at how crummy the wav files were
that came with the OS, but now I realize it's just esound that's
screwing them up somehow.

If it helps any, the 16-bit wav files that are shipped with KDE 1.1.2
don't exhibit this behavior. Just 8-bit wav files.

System:
Linux Mandrake 6.1
October GNOME (latest esound and audiofile releases)
Ensoniq AudioPCI soundcard (ES1370) with commercial OSS 3.9.3c.

Thanks in advance for any help you can contribute!

Andrew

what.wav