[Alsa-user] 5.1 vs Surround [was: Audigy 2 and duplicating front channels]

[Florin A. <fl...@an...>]

On Sat, 2003-04-26 at 16:25, Ing. Jozef Sakalos wrote:
> 
> when I play stereo (2 channel) digital stream on my Audigy 2 (e.g. 
> xmms - mp3, wav, Audio CD Reader) I have sound also in center and 
> rear speakers.
> 
> But, if I play CD directly (both analog and digital connection) or 
> if I play Line-In/Aux (TV Card) I have sound only in front 
> speakers.

I wonder if your amplifier (home theatre, whatever) has a means to
display what kind of digital signal it gets from the soundcard.

I have a similar problem with my old SBLive (using ALSA) and a Teac home
theatre. No matter what, the Teac reports the signal it gets from the
soundcard as "Dolby Surround". Needless to say, listening to stereo
sources is horrible, the center gets a large amount of the signal, the
stereo separation goes down the toilet, not to mention a horrible
mess-up of the frequency response.
I have to manually tell my Teac to force pure Stereo on the inputs to
fix the issue when i'm listening to CD or MP3 music (it's probably doing
a downmix internally).
However, that doesn't fix the DVDs. No matter what player i use, no
matter what settings, i don't get Dolby 5.1 from my PC, only the silly
Surround. The quality is obviously worse.
There's one exception though: i got my Teac to report "Dolby 5.1" when
using an old broken CVS version of xine. :-) It didn't work properly,
but my amplifier was reporting 5.1! :-O

But if i connect to the Teac my other home PC, which is an nForce-based
system (on-board nVidia sound chip), the Teac reports the signal as
"Dolby 5.1". Weird thing is, i'm using the same ALSA driver, same
kernel, same distribution, etc.

Questions:
Is there any way to make my SBLive use Dolby 5.1 for output instead of
the inferior Dolby Surround?
What is the reason i get Surround instead of 5.1?

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/