Tinny/flat sound in Ubuntu 10.04

Hello, I decided to give linux another try. I'm running 10.04 on my thinkpad T410. Everything is running great out of the box except for two caveats.
The sound is very tinny and flat. It's especially noticeable in games, but not so bad with movies.
Secondly, occasionally movies freeze/stutter while playing. I'm using VLC with all the medibuntu codecs/keyring installed. BIOS is up-to-date, and I have many components disabled in the BIOS that I don't use (such as the modem, wireless card, bluetooth, trackpad and trackpoint).
Any ideas? Otherwise Ubuntu is running great on my system. Well save for the fact that wine's game compatibility still leaves much to be desired, but that's not Ubuntu's fault.

 

I'm a Linux noob but I had sound issue with Kubuntu and I fixed them by opening the sound mixer just by clicking on the sound icon. A window should appear and if it's anything like Kubuntu you'll get your sound mixing options.

 

Unfortunately there is just a single volume slider, and the next tab I can select if I want full duplex or stereo (or something like that, going off of memory from last night).

 

Open a terminal and type alsamixer or sudo alsamixer. See whether you get a few tabs to play with. Other than that, you can try the various Ubuntu sound troubleshooting guide for example https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems

 

Thanks, I'll try the next time I'm in ubuntu, but I decided to test xubuntu, and I'm surprised to say that the sound quality is much better. It must be the pulseaudio drivers in ubuntu.
The next time I'm in ubuntu however I'll give your suggestion a shot. Thanks again.

 

They are the same, it must have been a stray setting.

 

That's strange. I wonder what that stray setting is then. Because it really sounds a lot better in xubuntu.

 

He's right....yeah, probably a rogue setting somewhere....don't worry about it ...I'm using Xfce also with Peppermint Ice (Ubuntu LTS base)...nice combination.

 

I'll look into it some more, but I'm liking xubuntu better (I always have). One other question, are there any decent, reliable cd burning programs for ubuntu? I have the latest update of nero linux 3 and it wont work properly. Most likely it's not compatible and they wont update it as they are selling version 4 now. Brasero is very buggy, I couldn't get any reliable burns with it, and I had to go back to windows just to burn a disc. :\

 

You could try Gnome baker or k3b.

 

I forgot about k3b! Thanks Thomas.

 

I reinstalled Ubuntu, and the sound seems better. I installed the gnome-alsamixer package, and the volume was already at max.
I forgot also about mkisofs and cdrecord, I remember using those before, and they come with Ubuntu lucid by default.
Thanks for the replies.