Sounds more like a soundcard driver problem. ESD's been working fine for me for a couple of years, with both onboard chips and PCI cards.
Marius Andreiana wrote:
GNOME sounds and xmms with esd output plugin make distorted sounds. Switching xmms to alsa and ogg123 in command line work ok. Is there a sound server which would use alsa directly instead of esd? Now I don't know how to change GNOME's and I can't output more than one sound at a time.