[mindcrime]

Yeah, the RPi is known for having a somewhat crappy built-in audio adapter. I was doing some stuff with speech synthesis using espeak-ng, and using the built in interface it was basically unusable. Now to be fair, the espeak-ng voices aren't that great to begin with... but they're usable on decent hardware! I switched to an external USB sound card and that made a dramatic difference. It's back to where the default English voice sounds kinda like WOPR from War Games, and some of the mbrola voices actually sound reasonable.