Solving "hollow" sound on playback

[Weasel]

After installing Audacity 2.03 on a new computer (HP Pavilion) I was vexed by the hollow, somewhat echo sound I was getting on playback. After temporarily installing another recording program (Wave Pad) and getting the same result it was obvious the fault lie in my computer and not in the program. Spending a good hour on resolving the issue I finally came upon a fix.

1) Go to your computer's "Control Panel"

2) "Hardware & Sound"

3) "Change System Sound"

4) "Playback"

5) "Speakers & Headphones"

6) "Advanced"

7) I Changed from 24 bit 48000 Hz to 16 bit 19200 Hz (studio Quality)

8 )Audacity now works beautifully!

[Gale Andrews]

Thanks for posting your experience.

I would hesitate to post that as a general solution, except perhaps the change from 24-bit to 16-bit if a computer was slow, because of the demands of the much higher sample rate. The problem you had may have been that some other setting in the sound device or computer was already on 192000 Hz, so was conflicting with 48000 Hz. I don't know without details. 48000 Hz is the sample rate for audio on DVD video discs, so is not low quality in itself.

The possible problem with your change if you are using 192000 Hz for Audacity project rate may be the extra amount of audio data being pushed around (four time as much on account of the sample rate increase, offset by a reduction in bit depth). Should you want to record at 192000 Hz in Audacity I would do a test recording first to make sure you are not getting dropouts, and also look at the Audacity Status Bar after starting recording to make sure you have enough disk space.

The usual solution for hollow playback and recording on Vista and later is to turn off audio settings in Windows that are meant to optimise computer calls over the internet:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/fa ... hancements .


Gale