Does ALSA have any advantage over DirectSound?

Question

I was just curious if ALSA + Linux has any better sound quality than Microsoft's Direct Sound in comparison.

Answer 1

The API one uses to access has little effect on sound quality, or at least should not have, if they're properly implemented (ALSA's dmix module takes some sacrifices in quality, but it only kicks in if multiple programs are accessing a soundcard that doesn't offer HW mixing of multiple streams).

Otherwise the samples are passed through to the sound hardware directly.