Arch Linux

bolero

Member

Registered: 2003-10-05

Posts: 60

Alsa no 5.1 surround sound

I recently had XBMC-Live distro installed and that system was able to play 5.1 on our sound system however due to some other specific issues, I have installed arch instead (I enjoy more control over the system) but for some reason I cannot figure out the life of me as to why ALSA will not play any sort of 5.1 sound out of my soundcard.

Its currently a XONAR DX, it works fine, in the sense that only left and right speakers work. I have tried modifying .asoundrc but have gotten no where so I removed those configurations.  When playing a surround sound music file with XBMC, you cant hear the entire thing due to the missing channels (Sounds quite amusing).

Using the command speaker-test -c 6 -D surround51 -t wav results in it showing it going through

 0 - Front Left
 4 - Center
 1 - Front Right
 3 - Rear Right
 2 - Rear Left
 5 - LFE

however only Front Left and Front Right work. Alsamixer has the following items

 Master Front - Master Rear - Master Center - Master Woofer - Master Side

all un muted and set to full volume.

Does a default install of Alsa require some extra configuration for full surround sound 5.1 to work?

garugaga

Member

Registered: 2011-06-28

Posts: 2

Re: Alsa no 5.1 surround sound

We have figured out the problem!

Apparently alsa defaults to the wrong module. It uses snd_virtuoso but it needs to use snd_oxygen. All we had to do to fix this was pick a card that used oxygen in the alsaconf script. Example: http://imgur.com/NIeJO

This completely fixed the problems