Pulse Audio not sending sound to speakers

Question

I've been wrestling with this problem for two days. Since upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04, I can no longer get multichannel (5.1) sound to my speakers. Stereo 2-channel sound was working, but it was using the onboard sound system. I want 5.1 surround sound using my Soundblaster Audigy2 card.

I have now disabled the onboard sound in my PC's BIOS. Now, ALSA is using the Audigy card. Pulse Audio is using the Audigy 5.1 as both source and sink. This is verified by monitoring them in padevchooser when a sound is being played. However, no sound is going to the speakers, which are wired into the three output jacks of the Audigy2 card.

All of this worked just fine on Ubuntu 10.10.

Tim

Answer 1

Try if this helps:

In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf remove the semicolon in the line ; enable-lfe-remixing yes.

If that was not enough try as well:

; default-sample-channels = 2 change to default-sample-channels = 6 (no semicolon and value changed from 2 to six).

Both are a long shot, but trying doesn't hurt.

Answer 2

Try editing asoundrc to configure the surround output so that it duplicates the stereo output to all 6 channels, instead of only through the front channel speakers.

Edit this file: gedit .asoundrc

Then add these lines:

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "surround51"
slave.channels 6
route_policy duplicate
}

Note: Run the below command, this will list the sound card installed. (If you see others, just remove or disable them).

aplay -l