One thing I really haven't messed with a while lot in linux beyond getting it working is sound.
A month or so ago, I loaded up Fedora 18 on my main desktop. At first I had issues getting sound working at all, and finally managed, after poking around a bit to at least get my mp3s and stuff to play. I have a harman/kardon speaker system, and the sound is really freaking muddy. It's like there is a bunch of sound processing going on behind the scenes, and the speakers are interpreting it as reverb or other surround sound stuff.
I realize there have been several evolutions of how sound is handled over the years, and would not be at all surprised if I have some artifacts of that in my .kde, .local or other user-based config directory. (could even be a system config somewhere.
To make matters somewhat worse is that I apparently have two audio controllers, and the system has been inconsistent with which it prefers. I'm assuming the "HD Audio Controller" below is the contoller on the motherboard, and the NVIDIA one is relating to the HDMI out on my video card (I just dug around and located a spare HDMI cable - I'll deal with testing that out some other time)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller
02:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
The KDE 'mixer' program seems to adjust the volume sometimes, but when I run VLC, it's like there is a completely different volume control that is independent of that.
It appears I'm running pulse audio
zeugmaamp 13868 1 0 Aug07 ? 00:18:28 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start
But I've seen messages indicating some programs expect 'alsa' in addition or in place of that.
Do any of you guys have a good resource for getting this stuff cleaned up, so it will be more straightforward going forth?
If you are having sound issues, I recommend trying Mint Mate (or my personal favorite, KDE).. 99.9% will work from the LiveDisc