Problem with sound capture (noisy plus voice suppressed)

Hi Audio Experts,

I am running Ubuntu on beagleboard, have installed alsa and am experimenting with aplay and arecord. The aplay seems to work OK (.wav files recorded on other machines are played OK) however in case of file recorded through acapture I hear a lot of noise. Also the voice is almost impossible to hear while the music is loud and noisy. Even if I do not record through arecord and directly play the source I can listen to the music in the speaker but that is also noisy with the voice component suppressed. (so loopback is enabled but is noisy ?). Any help would be appreciated