Is it just me or does sound quality suck in Fedora?

[RS]

My fellow Fedorans,

I noticed some weird issues with my dual boot (Fedora 9/XP) workstation at
home. I bought a new Creative PCI sound card and I can feel a definite
improvement in the quality of the sound when compared to the onboard
solution on XP (much richer bass and treble, nice eq settings for different
genres)

I booted into Fedora 9 and applied all the latest updates. I won't go into
the issues with PulseAudio since there are plenty of rants about that in the
archives. I noticed some huge differences in the quality of the sound
output. For once, I need to push the volume settings all the way up to get
decent quality when watching a DVD or listening to music. At higher volume
levels, I could detect some background hiss and noise. I fiddled with all
the mixer settings and went nowhere. I have the codecs for mp3 and divx etc
from dag wiers. I also ripped an audio CD (We love you Norah!) to ogg and
mp3 and the quality  of the output was poor when compared to XP. I tested
this with Rhythmbox, XMMS and VLC.

Is this a driver problem or does ALSA itself just suck? Weirdly enough, my
laptop running Ubuntu also some suffers from somewhat similar symptoms.
Should I be looking at the newly open sourced OSS??

-- RS
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