See EDITs at bottom before responding...
As detailed in gory detail here... http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...1032645&page=2 I have reverted to nvidia173 b/c later drivers have some very adverse effects on my 8200 IGP.... the consequence of this is losing HDMI audio.. ok, no problem I thought.. on the rear of the machine (Acer X1200) I have a set of jacks 2-wide and 3-high.. the manual that came with the machine says nothing about which is which.. so I rebooted into Vista and the Audio control panel showed me a picture indicating that 3 jacks each carry 2 channels..
- orange is front L+R
- black is rear L+R
- green is Center+Sub
And under Vista I was able to click on each speaker and confirm its location with a test tone. I also downloaded several test sound clips from around the web that will speak the speaker location from each speaker.
Back to Ubuntu...
When I play the same clips under Ubuntu with aplay, the sounds maybe sorta seem to come out the right place... I think.
I can't get speaker-test to work tho... I tried
Code:
and
Code:
and only hear sound from front left/right.
When I load 5.1 clip in to VLC and set the Audio to 5.1, the center is played out both L+R and the rear sounds come out the front as well... so it seems like its being downmixed.
When I load a true 5.1 movie, its like the speakers are all rotated.. center channel audio is barely audible, seemingly coming from the wrong speakers. I dunno, maybe the jack colors is totally software configurable and Vista is picking one mapping and Ubuntu is picking another?
In sound prefs I am using HDA NVidia ALC888 Analog (ALSA) for the various pull-downs and HDA NVidia (Alsa mixer) as my mixer, with all tracks selected in the select box.
To my /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file I have added and then removed
Code:
which didn't seem to help nor hurt.
So in the process of this I now seem to have killed sound.. so I reboot.. still no sound.. and it gets stranger.. on the small speaker/sound icon on the toolbar I hit mute and then unmute.. now I have sound, but its full of background white noise. I reboot again, same thing.. best approximation is like there is a rogue process entering in to the mixer
EDIT: I have sound again.. but still not getting it from anything other than front L/R. In VLC, if I load a 5.1 movie, it sounds "ok" if I leave VLC audio device to stereo, but when I go to 5.1, I lose dialog, etc, as the center channel signal isn't getting to my rcvr.
EDIT 2: in VLC, in advanced options, if I go to ALSA and change the ALSA device name to HDA NVIDIA:ALC888 Analog(hw:0.0) now I have center channel dialog.... so I think the remaining question is how to get speaker-test working?
EDIT3: another clip in VLC doesn't have 5.1 as an audio device, only A52 over SPDIF.. which I don't have.. so I can't get 5.1 from that ???!?!
argh.. I thought my life was going to be simpler by not using the bleeding edge HDMI audio.. but that was MUCH simpler.. it just worked (ignoring the fact that nvidia video choked on full-screen flash)
thanks for any pointers,
Mike
As detailed in gory detail here... http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...1032645&page=2 I have reverted to nvidia173 b/c later drivers have some very adverse effects on my 8200 IGP.... the consequence of this is losing HDMI audio.. ok, no problem I thought.. on the rear of the machine (Acer X1200) I have a set of jacks 2-wide and 3-high.. the manual that came with the machine says nothing about which is which.. so I rebooted into Vista and the Audio control panel showed me a picture indicating that 3 jacks each carry 2 channels..
- orange is front L+R
- black is rear L+R
- green is Center+Sub
And under Vista I was able to click on each speaker and confirm its location with a test tone. I also downloaded several test sound clips from around the web that will speak the speaker location from each speaker.
Back to Ubuntu...
When I play the same clips under Ubuntu with aplay, the sounds maybe sorta seem to come out the right place... I think.
I can't get speaker-test to work tho... I tried
Code:
Code:
speaker-test -c6 -l1 -twav
Code:
Code:
speaker-test -c6 -l1 -Dplug:surround51 -twav
When I load 5.1 clip in to VLC and set the Audio to 5.1, the center is played out both L+R and the rear sounds come out the front as well... so it seems like its being downmixed.
When I load a true 5.1 movie, its like the speakers are all rotated.. center channel audio is barely audible, seemingly coming from the wrong speakers. I dunno, maybe the jack colors is totally software configurable and Vista is picking one mapping and Ubuntu is picking another?
In sound prefs I am using HDA NVidia ALC888 Analog (ALSA) for the various pull-downs and HDA NVidia (Alsa mixer) as my mixer, with all tracks selected in the select box.
To my /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file I have added and then removed
Code:
Code:
options snd-hda-intel model=3stack
So in the process of this I now seem to have killed sound.. so I reboot.. still no sound.. and it gets stranger.. on the small speaker/sound icon on the toolbar I hit mute and then unmute.. now I have sound, but its full of background white noise. I reboot again, same thing.. best approximation is like there is a rogue process entering in to the mixer
EDIT: I have sound again.. but still not getting it from anything other than front L/R. In VLC, if I load a 5.1 movie, it sounds "ok" if I leave VLC audio device to stereo, but when I go to 5.1, I lose dialog, etc, as the center channel signal isn't getting to my rcvr.
EDIT 2: in VLC, in advanced options, if I go to ALSA and change the ALSA device name to HDA NVIDIA:ALC888 Analog(hw:0.0) now I have center channel dialog.... so I think the remaining question is how to get speaker-test working?
EDIT3: another clip in VLC doesn't have 5.1 as an audio device, only A52 over SPDIF.. which I don't have.. so I can't get 5.1 from that ???!?!
argh.. I thought my life was going to be simpler by not using the bleeding edge HDMI audio.. but that was MUCH simpler.. it just worked (ignoring the fact that nvidia video choked on full-screen flash)
thanks for any pointers,
Mike