my desktop is currently dual booting gentoo and windows, and i use it to play music, among other things. under windows, my sound quality is great (i cant tell the difference anyway), but when im in linux, the quality is just horrible. it sounds very tinny, and listening to piano music is just painful. i thought for a while that this was just a problem with linux, but i reinstalled my system a few days ago (remember my comment about qtparted working great for moving/resizing reiserfs partitions? yeah... ignore that), and i decided to use knoppix instead of the gentoo livecd so i could listen to music during the install. much to my surprise, the sound quality was just as good as it is in windows. the only thing i can think of thats different in knoppix is that it runs arts... does that really affect sound quality? ive been trying to go with just straight alsa, but something is apparently not right with the way im doing it. any thoughts would be appreciated.

x-posted to gentoo

update, now that im back at my computer: lspci says its a Via Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50). the module im using is snd_via82xx. the problem is the same using either alsa or oss output, but im not using any kind of software mixer.