Ubuntu – No bass from the speakers

preferencessound

In Ubuntu 11.10 no bass sound at all when try to play mp3 or 2channels audio. I have 5.1/6 channels speakers.

When I test speakers from the sound preference it works perfectly fine and then I try to play any MP3 there is no bass only the speakers work, I play 5.1 movies it plays fine bass sounds good.

Also tried to to some changes as instructed with deamon.conf file but no go…

When I turn my speakers on play speakers only mode it plays the bass but sound quality is not good compared to normal playing. I have a Creative 5.1 vx ca0160 sound card.

In Windows also had the same problem unless I do bass redirection crossover frequency so is there any kinda software package or any kinda changes i can make in system file so that my speaker bass works fine or any thing who can let me change the bass redirection crossover frequency?

Best Answer

To get bass, you can edit the settings using alsamixer from the terminal. Sometimes by default, certain channels are muted as denoted by MM. Simply press the M key on your keyboard.

1) Set channels for the daemon

To set the default channels (5.1.) for the pulseaudio daemon we can edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf as root and edit the following lines to

default-sample-channels = 6
enable-lfe-remixing = yes

Note: Pulseaudio may not run properly if not a valid channel number is given.

2) Set a default card profile

Alternatively we may also define a default sound card profile in /etc/pulse/default.pa (or if defined for a user session only in ~/.pulse/default.pa).

set-card-profile <index> <name>

where we need to give the <index> of the sound card (e.g. 0) and the <name>(e.g. "Digital Surround 5.1 (HDMI)") of the profile we want as default. Possible values are listed with the following command

pacmd list-sinks

Note: for changes to settings files to take effect we need to restart the pulseaudio daemon by

pulseaudio -k

Ubuntu – 5.1 audio via HDMI only plays on two channels

Ah, I figured it out!

tl;dr: the problem was the S/PDIF link between my TV and speakers, which can only carry two uncompressed audio channels.

What triggered my understanding and a very deep dive down the rabbit hole of various incompatible drivers, audio containers/codecs, and cable types was this forum post: http://www.tomsguide.com/forum/59518-6-working-connected-hdmi-optical#561415

Basically, the problem is that when I do that speaker test, Ubuntu is outputting uncompressed 5.1 audio over HDMI. My TV receives that and tries to transmit it to my speakers over S/PDIF, but S/PDIF only supports 2 channels of uncompressed audio! So, it gets downsampled to only 2 channels.

I was fooled into thinking this should work because I've obviously played 5.1 audio over S/PDIF prior to this, but what I didn't realize is that it was encoded via Dolby or DTS to work over S/PDIF.

It seems like my possible solutions are:

Continue to output 5.1 uncompressed audio and replace my S/PDIF cable with an HDMI cable.
Change PulseAudio to output 2 channel audio and enable DTS/AC3 passthru both in PulseAudio and Kodi, as described here: Enabling 7.1 audio passthru in 14.04 for Kodi

I'm not sure that either has a particular advantage. Option 2 involves fewer cables, but if I try to play a file with 5.1 channel PCM encoding (I imagine that's pretty rare) I'll be out of luck.

Another thing that wasn't obvious to me in setting up PAVU Control is that Dolby technically AC3, and Dolby Plus is EAC3.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – 2 channel sound when 5.1 is expected

1) Set channels for the daemon

2) Set a default card profile

Ubuntu – 5.1 audio via HDMI only plays on two channels

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