[linux-audio-user] Distortion -- bad speakers or cheap soundcard?

Several questions, all of which may stem from quite imperfect understanding. (Please be gentle to the terminal newbie...) I have an admittedly consumer-grade sound-card (SB PCI 16) and moderately acceptable speakers with a under-desk sub-woofer. My question is this: when synthesizing a MIDI file from timidity using a soundfont, how do I tell whether the distortion is permanently in the .wav file, or if it's just my speakers? And if it is part of the *.wav file, what adjustments should I make to eliminate the distortion before creating a CD? Would I just need to reduce some levels either with timidity switches, or with alsamixer? Here's where my limited understanding of sound processing and hardware fail me: it seems to me that, if in rendering a MIDI file through a softsynth such as timidity, when I specify output directly into a wav file (e.g. with timidity it would be with the switch '-Ow' then I ought to be able to get decent digital output, even if my local speakers couldn't handle it. I was thinking it would be analogous to rendering a full color ray-traced image, even if I was using an ancient video card that couldn't handle more than say, 16 colors. After all, it's the software doing the processing, isn't it, even if I don't happen to have hardware that can render in real time? How is it that the DAC on my soundcard can handle input from a commercial audio CD, outputting sound levels at least as high, but w/o distortion? If you can suggest background to read up on, that would be useful, too! But nothing too technical, please, I never took trig or calculus... ;-) Thanks! -Mark __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail for Mobile Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Check email on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/learn/mail