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#1 2011-02-10 08:55:13

gbj13
Member
Registered: 2010-05-06
Posts: 109

Asus Xonar DG headphone problem

I recently bought a Xonar DG  card for my computer.  Alsa successfully recognises the soundcard and I am able to hear sounds, but I am having a weird problem. 
I connect to the soundcard via headphones and I am only able to hear sound when I connect the headphones to Center/Subwoofer Out Port on the card.  The sound is also rather low. 
I have tried using this soundcard in Windows and there I must switch headphones ports and connect the headphones to Headphone/ Front Out Port, and then I hear sound.  The sound in windows is also much louder and clearer.  This soundcard should be supported by alsa, as per the Alsa wiki

I hope I have been clear in describing my problem.  Has anyone else experienced this problem and is there perhaps a way to force the alsa audio output trough the headphone port instead of the subwoofer port?

Thank you for reading and any help would be appreciated.

Last edited by gbj13 (2011-02-10 09:53:13)

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#2 2011-03-02 08:52:22

KozmoNaut
Member
Registered: 2010-06-10
Posts: 5

Re: Asus Xonar DG headphone problem

How does your Xonar DG show up in dmesg?

I get nothing, not even if I load the snd-oxygen module manually. The card shows up in lspci just fine:

3:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CMI8788 [Oxygen HD Audio]

Needless to say, I get no sound.

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#3 2011-03-02 10:35:35

gbj13
Member
Registered: 2010-05-06
Posts: 109

Re: Asus Xonar DG headphone problem

Well I go sound by compiling alsa manually as per their wiki for Asus Xonar DG
I get sound and it is quite good, but the only problem is as I mentioned with the jacks when I switch to windows.

dmesg shows no errors when I load

modprobe snd-oxygen ; modprobe snd-pcm-oss ; modprobe snd-mixer-oss ; modprobe snd-seq-oss

If it is any help, I am using headphones and I get sound from the center/subwoofer port.  I guess that I will have to wait for a new version of alsa or the kernel  until this is cleared up.

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#4 2011-06-13 22:00:16

sado1
Member
Registered: 2011-06-13
Posts: 4

Re: Asus Xonar DG headphone problem

People say that everytime someone digs out an old topic, a kitten dies, but I guess I'm justified this time. This link is high in Google stats for "asus xonar dg linux" keywords and I thought if I'd tell a word about configuring the card (and more or less answering the question above) someone else may have less googling to do. (I dont even run Arch Linux and I feel it's kind of rude to post about my experiences from other distribution here, but I hope you will understand)

So, the card seemed not to work under alsa when my headphones were plugged into headphone slot, I didn't test if center port worked (I assume it would), but tried another thing, which was installing PulseAudio, as suggested on alsa wiki - alsa alone doesn't provide volume control for this card and installing PA is the workaround. After doing that, my sound started to work. What I noticed though is that when I launched alsamixer, I could change some of card's settings. The setting 'Analog output', when set to "Headphones", it makes the headphones not to work, they work though on "FP (Front Panel?) Headphones" and "Speakers" settings (without PA, sound didn't work on any of these settings). Seeing as the sound is also worse than on Windows - impendance setting doesn't change anything, bass is distorted, sound is quieter - I assume it's due to headphone amplifier not working yet under Linux. The mixer setting probably 'workarounds' amp chip (I can even hear the 'tick' noise from my card when changing this setting) when not set to Headphones, and sound works (on HP Headphones/Speakers setting) because the output starts acting like non-headphone output.

It seems then we need to wait until alsa provides headphone amplifier support (and I hate using windows now just to enjoy better sound quality hmm). For now, with PulseAudio you can at least use the same jack for both systems.

edit: just some simple workaround for no headphone amplifier support - with volume full and after playing with some pulseaudio equalizer settings results are pretty good, bass is nice on my headphones, just remember to reduce everything but low frequencies (they have to be on 0, and everything else should be set much lower) - if you try to boost low frequencies above 0 instead, it'll be distorted. look at example of my eq settings here: http://i54.tinypic.com/9apf0n.png

Last edited by sado1 (2011-08-26 17:25:41)

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