[PATCH]: enable subwoofer on some laptops

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Greetings,

On my Dell Inspiron e1705 with a Sigmatel stac9200, there is a
"subwoofer" that is attached to a separate speaker pin widget.  The
"Master" control only controls the 4 main speakers.

This patch should enable the subwoofer on similarly equipped laptops,
by creating the LFE mixer controls, although at present it is coded to
be very specific to the 9200.

It assumes that the first mono speaker pin with an amp is the
subwoofer, and I assume that no stac9200 implementation in the world
has both a Center/LFE line out _and_ an LFE speaker attached.  Since
the 9200 is only a 2-channel codec to begin with, this seems
reasonable, but I've probably made other potentially incorrect
assumptions, so please review carefully.

One problem with this patch, even if it works as intended, is that it
doesn't provide a very satisfying end-user experience, at least for
e1705 owners.  The problem is that the LFE pin is almost completely
independant of the Master control, so to change the volume the user
must operate both controls, which will likely throw the audio balance
off.  This can be avoided by using the PCM control, but PCM has no
mute switch.  And muting Master does not mute LFE, although setting
Master to 0 does mute LFE.

So I have another version of this patch that implements the actual LFE
channel volume as a function of the master and LFE volumes.  It is
really, really fugly, but at least it provides nice behavior for the
user!  It feels wrong to implement that kind of thing in the lowest
levels of the driver, but without a plugin mixer API (which I have no
clue where to start on that effort!), I don't see any other option.

Since the alternative is so fugly, I am holding that back for now,
even though it is what I intend to use on my system.  But if you are
at all interested in it, let me know and I'll clean it up a bit and
submit it.

I'm not sure whether it was Sigmatel or (more likely) Dell who screwed
this up so badly, but somebody should take a beating over this.

-Richard

Attachment: rjf-alsa-20060905.patch
Description: Binary data

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