Ubuntu – 5.1 sound on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with 3 3,5mm jacks allows stereo onlly

20.04pulseaudiosound

I'm aware this question has been asked a few times, but none of the answers did help during my 18.04 time.
My mainboard is an Asus Prime H310M-AR2.0 with 3 jacks in the back for 5.1 sound.
mainboad description: "Realtek ALC887 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC".

My system is dual boot with Windows 10 and Ubuntu LTS. Until two days ago it was 18.04, where there was stereo onl, too. Now I have upgraded to 20.04. I was told by a journalist the upgrade could possibly help, but it did not.

My speakers is a Logitech 5.1 surround system with 6 speakers and 3 jacks.
Running Windows 10 I can hear all 6 speakers separately, so the hardware is definitely OK.

But Ubuntu always shows stereo and I can test front left and front right only.
"PulseAudio Volume Control" only allows "Line stereo (connected)" and "Headphone (not connected)". A connected headphone works fine with stereo, b.t.w.

Is there a way to reset Ubuntu's sound system completely so that it is newly recognized?
Or is such a configuration simply too "old"?

Best Answer

You have to edit /etc/pulse/daemon.confand define the number of channels for your sound card.

Find

; default-sample-channels = 2

Uncomment it by removing the leading ;, and change it from 2 to 6:

default-sample-channels = 6

After saving that change, kill pulseaudio by running:

pulseaudio -k

(It restarts itself after a few seconds.)

That's all.

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Your fears are founded : rear and front output are the same only when the source is simple stereo (i.e. music, or basic divx films). For other sources (DVDs, but most importantly games), they are different, and you will have a bad experience...

I Have the same kind of setup as you, but with two sets of speakers and a headset. The only solution I've used so far is use only the front output, with an audio "strip". That is crude, but works...

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Ubuntu – 5.1 surround sound with three 3.5mm jacks

First, you should define in ALSA that you have 6 channels. You can refer to this post. Basically, you launch alsamixer and you define (for the right soundcard) the number of channels to 6. Then you store the configuration in order to be reloaded on reboot:

sudo alsactl store

Then pulseaudio should be configure (pulse is the sound layer that will be used by apps and talks directly to ALSA.). You should define the number of channels in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, like said in this documentation:

default-sample-channels = 6

Also, to enable the remixing of low frequencies in your subwoofer, you should activate this in your sound card by editing the same file /etc/pulse/daemon.conf:

enable-lfe-remixing = yes

Then, you maybe need to reboot, or kill and relaunch pulseaudio:

pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio -D

Then, pavucontrol may help you, as replied in this question. In the configuration tab, you should see different profiles for your sound card, for example "Suround analogiq 4.1" that means that you want to use 4 channels and 1 subwoofer.

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