Different quality flac tracks with equalizer enabled

Section8

Hello,
I am running Strawberry 1.0.12 on gentoo linux. I am having a minor annoyance playing .flac files, with the equalizer enabled. Most of my flac tracks are of CD quality: 44100 Hz, 16 bit depth, ~700-1000 kbps. I have a few flac tracks that are much higher quality: 192000 Hz, 24 bit depth, ~5000 kbps.

When Strawberry transitions between playing these different quality flac tracks, the audio is clearly distorted. So if Strawberry begins playing a CD quality flac track, after playing a high quality track, the audio sounds high pitched, as if it has no bass.

If the transition is the other way around, and Strawberry plays a high quality flac track, after playing a CD quality track, the audio sounds sort of muffled.

In both cases, after hitting the Stop button, and re-starting the track, the audio is normal. Also, this only happens if the equalizer is enabled, and disabling/re-enabling the equalizer also restores normal audio.

Is this a bug, and is there some setting I can tweak to address this?

jonas

@Section8
I can't reproduce this.
If you use PulseAudio, try temporary disabling it and set Strawberry output to ALSA.

Section8

@jonas Thanks. I am using PipeWire, but have the Strawberry backend set to Gstreamer, with output to a PulseAudio server. Changing the output to Alsa doesn't make any difference.

jonas

I think pipewire is enabled even if you output to ALSA as long as pipewire is installed and enabled on the system. At least that's what I've experienced the times pipewire was installed on my system without my knowledge. But someone with technical insight into pipewire should probably answer if this issue could be related to pipewire or not.
Assuming you are playing without resampling to 48/16, only the bit depth with be converted to 16 bit by the equalizer since that's what it's operating at, the sample rate stays the same. So it could be that your DAC isn't tackling the direct transition from 44.1/16 to 192/16 and wise-versa. If possible test with a different DAC.

Miguel Ruiz

I have a similar problem.
A distortion when the ecualizator is on. But I've checked that it doesn't matter if the codec is flac or mp3.

In audio output the values are:

Engine: GStreamer
Output: Wrapper audio sink for automatically detected audio sink
Device: Automatically select

I have tried a lot of combinations, but the result is exactly the same.

Other players, like f.e. audacity or audacious or even clementine, runs perfectly.

jonas

@Miguel-Ruiz
I can't reproduce this issue, I've tested with 2 different DACs on 2 different computers.
As I suggested earlier, try temporarily deactivating PipeWire and PulseAudio and set output to ALSA.
Other gstreamer based players might work because they lower the audio quality and or resample the sample rate using audioresample.