[martinu]

Further testing has established that the sound card produces a lot of distortion and metallic sound quality when recording at lower bit rates.

I've just done test recordings from my mike using CoolEdit.

- At 44 kHz sample rate, the quality is good, though there's rather a lot of background hiss

- At 22 kHz, there's some metallic quality

- At 11 and 8 kHz, the sound is raspy and muffled: I sound as if I have a lisp!

Taking the original 44 kHz recording and downsampling it in CoolEdit to 22, 11 or 8 shows the difference: obviously the lower sample rates have their higher frequencies removed, but they are free of distortion compared with the versions which were originally recorded at the same rate.

The reason that I've experienced poor quality sound in PalTalk is probably that it samples at 8 or 11 kHz.

There's evidently something seriously wrong with either the hardware or the drivers. I've raised a call with Acer but not had any reply yet. I'll keep you posted.