Sorry if this is the wrong place to discuss this, but from what I managed to find out, this is primarily the responsibility of ALSA. This was pointed out by a reddit user, and to be frank, I was kinda surprised that this is not done by default. The user in question is hearing impaired (can listen on only one ear), so the user has no benefit of actually listening to stereo or any other multichannel audio, thus wanted to just set everything to mono (dual mono I presume) and was puzzled when there was no such option in pulseaudio (which pulls the profiles from ALSA). I did some more investigation and as it turns out, this profile is autogenerated, but only if the hardware has such capability (as is the case with any other profile). You can enable it manually by editing config files (in which case I presume the channel downconversion is done in software), but it seemed odd that one has to go through such trouble just to listen to mono sound. Thus, I think the mono profile should be taken as a special case scenario and be autogenerated/configured by default, regardless if it's supported in hardware or not. Once again, I'm sorry if this is not the place to ask/discuss this, but would appreciate if someone pointed me to where I can actually do this.
