Re: [alsa-devel] Recording sound from microphone isn't good working that playback sound is distortion.

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 03:00:16PM +0800, Xiaoyong Wen wrote:

 3. Recording sound from microphone isn't good working that playback sound is distortion. 
 #arecord -D 'hw:0,0' -r 48000 -f S16_LE -c 2 | aplay -D 'hw:0,0' -c 2 &
 or
 #arecord -d 10 -fdat test2.wav
 I hear the sound is very distortion and low.
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 If I excute "amixer cset numid=9 3; amixer cset numid=7 31; amixer cset numid=87 on; amixer cset numid=6 31,31" command, and then volume is high.

This sounds fairly normal - microphones do need quite a bit of gain applying to get useful signals. I don't know what controls those are (the control names are much more useful, the numids do change between boards) but I would expect that microphone configuration wouldn't be ideal out of the box and would need some tuning for your system.