Ubuntu thinks my Audient iD14 audio interface is Analogue Surround 4.0 when it's actually stereo. Is there any way to fix this?

Question

I'm using an external Audient iD14 audio interface with a Windows 10 and Ubuntu 14.04 dual boot system. I mainly use Windows for FL Studio and the Adobe Creative Suite, but I like to mess around with Ubuntu from time to time, especially for programming.

Everything works great except that for some reason, Ubuntu lists my audio interface as Analogue Surround 4.0 when it actually only plays in stereo. As a result, the audio plays louder in the right channel than the left channel. While I can get it to work by adjusting the balance with the slider, it still sounds a little off. It's not bad, but it just doesn't sound as good as it does on Windows.

So is there any way to force Ubuntu to treat sound devices as stereo? I know the problem might be that there are no Audient device drivers for Linux, but I wanted to make sure before I just accept to live with slightly poorer audio quality.

Answer 1

I found solution in Linux Mint and Lubuntu, maybe it will work in another Linux...

1. In software manager, type alsa and install qashctl,
2. then in menu Sound and video find and open qashctl,
3. and on the right side, Mixer device, under hw: select Audient iD14
4. and on the left side under "Mixer" open Speaker playback volume and turn up volume to the top -127db and both channel work same and sound is very good.

Answer 2

Ubuntu (Linux in general) is correct in assigning 4 outputs as there are 4 outputs on the iD14.

As you and I both know, only one pair of outputs are physically accessible. Outputs 3&4 are primarily used to send alternate mixes to musicians and are only accessible via the Audient mixer and/or DAW. The iD14 is class compliant in as far as it is recognized and some audio can be heard. Unfortunately that is as far as it goes (currently) as there is no mixer available to ALSA or Pulse e.t.c.

If you open a terminal and run alsamixer, press F6 and select Audient iD14, it will report a broken pipe error. ALSA (or Pulseaudio) has no way of knowing how to allocate the outputs, so assumes all 4 detected outs are available, but also has no way of directing signal appropriately. It "MAY" be possible to create a new sink and assign it as stereo, but you may still get an imbalance in left and right, or worse, have left and right output on one channel only. Also, all the digital inputs and Scroll Control functions will not work.

Answer 3

a little late, but I found a workaround. You can't make Ubuntu recognize it as a stereo device. What you can do is configure your pulse daemon to play stereo sources only in stereo, instead of "remixing" them into surround.

Put this in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf:

enable-remixing = no

After that, simply run a:

pulseaudio --kill

Your pulse daemon will restart, and hopefully you hear smooth stereo sounds.

Answer 4

If anyone still reads this. I just tried it with my iD14 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and out of the box I had the sound only on one ear. First of all, setting the output configuration to Analog Surround 5.0 Output at least got the sound to both ears (but not on equal volume). And I got to equal volume by just raising the System Volume slider to max. For some reason, Ubuntu only controls the volume of the right ear and not the left so if the system volume is all the way up there is no difference and you can control your desired volume on the iD14.