4.4.9-rt17 series

[agent_kith]

With airy and thin I mean that the music lacks 'body and weight'. As if you can see right through the musicians. They are not actually there.
I cannot say the sound is too harsh in my setup. However as the mid-range is less apparent the high frequencies are more prominent. I assume this is actually because there is less noise. This may also be one of the reasons that sound stage got wider.
In the end I think the new kernel is an improvement in terms of sound stage and less noise. However I still have to work on how to get that nice mid-range back again. 

Try this, edit /boot/grub.cfg, look for your boot menu item, add "nolapic" at the end of the line. It'd look somehing like the following:

Code:

linux /casper/vmlinuz boot=casper file=/cdrom/preseed/snakeoil.seed persistent toram quiet splash nolapic

Save the file and try and see how it goes.. Also try noapic over nolapic and see which you prefer.