Having an issue with sound at the moment. I am trying to configure my 5.1 surround sound but it will only work on the Front left and Front right speakers. On the back of my motherboard I have 3×3.5mm jacks which I have connected the speakers to although these are not the right ports.
I want to "assign" the three ports on the back to each output (Sub and centre, Left and right, and rear left and right) although I'm not sure how to do this. My audio is ALC889 from Realtek and am using Ubuntu 12.04 with all updates installed.
Best Answer
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:
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:
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:
Then, you maybe need to reboot, or kill and relaunch pulseaudio:
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.