Sound recording/playing quality

Hi,
I am looking into the recording quality of the rock3A. Both recording and playing over the audiojack is of low quality.
I am using the debian distribution.

I tested this by using arecord in various options and by direct recording in audacity (using rockchip,rk809-codec).

When zooming in audacity to the waveform, it turn out to have a blockwave structure. The individual sampling points match the 44100 sampling resolution but the values in the wave-file are constant in groups of 13 or 14 samples, which matches an ‘actual sampling rate’ of something between 3000-3200. That explains the bad quality for both recording and playing.

I am not a linux specialist. The question is: where can we control this? It hope it is a software issue, but It feels as a hardware issue to me (which would be really bad for my intended application on the rock3A).
Any suggestions?
L.