Hi, all.
Do you know if Slack handles SIS sound cards well? No other distro does, apparently.
Shame we don't have some "generic" tool to handle those %$#@$ cards. Some older (cheep) machines had those SIS motherboards with everything on-board.

...want my two cents? Ditch the SiS stuff and invest in a better sound card (anything is better) - personal experience. Had troubles with the internal network card, popped in an other one and poof, networking right away. SiS stuff is... iffy at best.

Thor

Check out the HCL and see if your card is listed.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/

ALSA supports most SIS audio chipsets out of the box.

The page on the website will tell you what ALSA module you'll need to load, or look for as being detected.

Pretty much. All the SiS 'sound cards' I've seen are just AC97, aka really bad sounding (though the SIS966 shouldnt be, but I've never seen one).

You should be able to get a much better card 2nd hand for virtually nothing, or even new for less than $25 US.

From experience... Audio is audio on Linux. There's really no difference in terms of quality with any chips or cards due to ALSA's driver structure.

The SiS966 is nothing but an HDA codec. It has the same audio quality as any other chip that uses the snd_intel_hda driver, and fairly much any other ALSA driver supported audio card.

My Realtek ALC880 has the same quality of audio as my PCIe ASUS Xonar DX, except when I use it with Windows I get the benefits of the Xonar's hardware accelerated DirectSoundGX layer, OpenAL, EAX and such, while the Realtek driver only has software accelerated support of audio.

ALSA Linux drivers aren't like Windows drivers where features like EAX and wavetable audio quality really come into play. ALSA drivers mainly are there to provide audio and get it working with basic hardware level support.

There are differences in how well the code for any given sound chip is written. I can see your point about drivers (and driver features) with alsa, but thats not the only thing that matters.

The (mostly) hardware dependant stuff like SNR (Signal To Noise Ratio) and TDH (Total Harmonic Distortion) still matter.

I've got a few boards with different HDA chips, adn there is quite a difference in sound quality. The 2 boards I have with VIA chips (VT1708B and VT1708S) both have _far_ worse sound than the realtek 889 HDA I'm running at the moment. I've used a Xonar DX a few times, and it was a quite a bit better sounding than the RTL 889.

How much you would notice the differences in sound quality would depend on your speakers/amp, source material and your ears.

i've had a problem with the SIS sound hardware on my machine where Linux can't figure out what to do with the ADI audio chip. the sound seems to work fine, but when the machine is booting, the kernel complains about the ADI hardware. later when i get home, i'll post the entry from dmesg i'm talking about.

I think one of the 100 uses for Linux is to give extra life to several "older" machines we have (machines that could only handle up to a Win98 OS can easily run a 2011 Linux!!!). So, we cannot expend money changing cards.
I think / hope / wish, Linux supported those cards even minimally.

Besides that, yes, sis cards are too bad.

Cheers.

At least some of the SiS sound chips do work with linux.

See the link in ReaperX7s post.

VIA is oddly one of the few chipset makers I've tended to avoid like a plague ridden rat. Never have liked them, so audio-wise I'm in the dark with them. Had 5 systems with KT133/266/333 series and none of them were ever stable or reliable for usage. Had to RMA one board 4 times back to the manufacturer.

ok, so i thought my SIS sound hardware was still showing an error. it definitely used to with slack 13.0, but i find nothing in dmesg, /var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog or /var/log/debug to indicate it's still happening in 13.37

Actually, both the VIA sound chips I have are on other manufacuters chipsets- ones intel (asus P5KPL-CM, Intel G31) and ones nVidia (asrock NC68-S UCC, nForce 630a)

I've had a few VIA KT266A/333 boards. None of them lasted that long, though at least the A7V-266E I had ran OK....though I did have to RMA it, and then the replacement died again just outside of warranty. A lot of the other KT266A/333/400 boards I've seen were far worse.

The only running socket 'a' boards I still have are nVidia (asus A7N-266, nForce 1) and...oddly enough...SiS (ECS K7S5A, SiS 735). Even though SiS is considered fairly crap, I've actually had good luck with SiS chipset boards.

@unclejed613 ALSA has been updated a bunch since 13.0 was initially released. The newer version included with 13.37 could have updates that have repaired your error. It actually happens something gets fixed.

@cascade9 SiS is generally a medium to low end chipset manufacturer from ratings and reviews, but I've always found SiS to be fairly reliable. Had one system (SiS 630/730S) outlast an Intel and an Nvidia system by several years (Intel 900 board lasted 1.5 years and Nvidia nForce 430 board lasted 3.5 years) before the power supply barfed out and destroyed the motherboard after 7.5 years running strong. For a low end manufacturer they often have the best reliability and stability of any manufacturer I've had the pleasure to use.

I'd tend to agree about SiS ReaperX7. Though I did have a lot of dodgy socket 370 SiS chipset boards go though where I used to work (refurbishing).

Its a pity that SiS has pretty much dropped off the market.