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I just bought a bluetooth stereo speaker and I had an idea:

Is it possible to build a 4.0 audio system using my Bluetooth speakers as rear speaker and two normal cabled stereo speakers (or another pair of bluetooth speakers) as front? Which program I have to use?

In general: is it possible to split a 4.0 or 5.1 signal in the single channels and send them to multiple devices?

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It would be neat but I doubt it. I'd recommend digging deeper into pulseaudio. – con-f-use Aug 20 '12 at 15:43
Even if this was possible, wouldn't the different sets of speakers be in different sync, due to differences in chipset latencies and especially over bluetooth? You would hear a kind of echo, I presume. – taneli Aug 28 '12 at 10:52

2 Answers

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strictly speaking no. a single sound card processes the data synch's all the channels and makes front left x% stronger and rear right x% weaker so that the explosion on the front left of the screen sounds right. or the reverse when a jet flies over from the rear.

you can make a psudo setup but if you want good sound get a proper card and speakers. a well equiped and setup system can sound amaizing. I got an omega sound card for the wifes pc because she watches a lot of dvd's even on the cheezy speakers we have it sounds decent. when I got that omega I was quite suprised how much a difference a good sound card makes. I was used to the creative labs audigy.

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I got it to work by combining the advice from this thread http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-859769-start-0.html and this article. http://confignewton.com/?p=211

from the confignewton article, do what it says about commenting out the module-udev-detect and module-detect lines in both default.pa and system.pa

next, I added this to default.pa:

### Load audio drivers statically
### (it's probably better to not load these drivers manually, but instead
### use module-udev-detect -- see below -- for doing this automatically)
load-module module-alsa-sink sink_name=rear device=hw:0 channels=2 channel_map=rear-left,rear-right
load-module module-alsa-sink sink_name=front device=hw:1 channels=2 channel_map=front-left,front-right

At the end of default.pa, I added a line similar to what is talked about in the gentoo thread:

load-module module-combine channels=4 channel_map=front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right
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