'Twas brillig, and Julian Sikorski at 20/06/11 22:19 did gyre and gimble: > W dniu 20.06.2011 10:33, Colin Guthrie pisze: >> 'Twas brillig, and Julian Sikorski at 19/06/11 20:31 did gyre and gimble: >>> W dniu 19.06.2011 18:20, Colin Guthrie pisze: >>>> The output from amixer -c0 would likely offer some clues. >>> >>> I am attaching the screenshot of alsamixer -c0 >> >> The amixer -c0 output is infinity more useful for debug than a screenshot ;) >> >> Col >> >> > Here you go. OK, so something is missing here... it's missing any kcontrols for adjusting any surround sound elements. Every bit of hardware is different, but e.g. on I happen to have to hand says (among other things): Simple mixer control 'Surround',0 Capabilities: pvolume pswitch penum Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Front Left: Playback 0 [0%] [-46.50dB] [off] Front Right: Playback 0 [0%] [-46.50dB] [off] Simple mixer control 'Surround Down Mix',0 Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined penum Playback channels: Mono Mono: Playback [off] Simple mixer control 'Surround Jack Mode',0 Capabilities: enum Items: 'Shared' 'Independent' Item0: 'Shared' Simple mixer control 'Center',0 Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined penum Playback channels: Mono Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Playback 31 [100%] [0.00dB] [off] Simple mixer control 'Center/LFE Down Mix',0 Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined penum Playback channels: Mono Mono: Playback [off] Simple mixer control 'LFE',0 Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined penum Playback channels: Mono Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Playback 0 [0%] [-46.50dB] [off] So something is wrong at the alsa level. You may be able to play back 5.1 sound but there are no controls to back that up. You should try something like e.g. [colin at jimmy ~]$ pasuspender bash [colin at jimmy ~]$ speaker-test -D surround51:0 speaker-test 1.0.24.2 Playback device is surround51:0 Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 1 channels Using 16 octaves of pink noise Channels count (1) not available for playbacks: Invalid argument Setting of hwparams failed: Invalid argument [colin at jimmy ~]$ exit I expect you'll get a similar failure I get there. If it works correctly and you hear things from each speaker separately then I'd be surprised. But if it does fail, then it could simply be a matter that the incorrect model was detected for your HDA driver. http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sound/alsa/HD-Audio-Models.txt You can set this in your /etc/modprobe.conf (or a file in /etc/modprobe.d/): options snd-hda-intel model=foo (or something similar). To try out different modules. You will have to reload your alsa drivers fro this to take effect (a reboot is simplest, so if you don't have many options for your chipset, that's probably easier. If you have a few to try, I'd read up a bit on how to reload your alsa drivers manually without rebooting :)) Hopefully when you get the right model, your surround51 device will work and PA can pick it up. So I'm pretty sure the problem is lower down than PA. I had someone on IRC the other day with the same problem, but they refused to believe me, even when they posted their amixer output that did not include any surround controls.... Not much I can do other than point out things that look wrong to me, so I hope you can find the right solution and answer this conundrum :) Col -- Colin Guthrie gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/] Open Source: Mageia Contributor [http://www.mageia.org/] PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/] Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]