[Alsa-user] 10 channel audio out on ALC1150

[Adam Z. <ad...@ze...>]

Hi ALSA users.

Apologies for the duplicate and incomplete and un-titled message.
Apparently tab + space-bar in GMail == send-message. Really?! /rant


I have a motherboard with onboard audio powered by the ALC1150 chipset.
The board has 5 stereo jacks (Green, Black, Orange, Pink, Blue), which
by default are assigned:
- 6 channel/5.1 out: Green (Pin 0x14), Black (0x15), Orange (0x16)
- 4 channel in: Pink (0x18), Blue (0x1a)

I've used hda-jack-retask to retask the input jacks as outputs.

`demsg` shows that snd_hda_codec_realtek is correctly seeing 5 outputs:

 autoconfig for ALC1150: line_outs=5 (0x15/0x16/0x18/0x1a/0x14) type:line
    speaker_outs=0 (0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)
    hp_outs=0 (0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)
    mono: mono_out=0x0
    inputs:

If I try and use speaker-test to test all 10 channels, it fails:

$ speaker-test -D hw:0,0 -c 10
...
Unable to set hw params for playback: Invalid argument
Setting of hwparams failed: Invalid argument

Yet, 8 channels works:
$ speaker-test -D hw:0,0 -c 10
 0 - Front Left
 4 - Front Center
 1 - Front Right
 7 - Side Right
 3 - Rear Right
 2 - Rear Left
 6 - Side Left
 5 - LFE

To verify that it wasn't a problem with the two retasked line in
jacks, I reconfigured the device so that only the Pink and Blue jacks
were present:

 autoconfig for ALC1150: line_outs=2 (0x1a/0x18/0x0/0x0/0x0) type:line
    speaker_outs=0 (0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)
    hp_outs=0 (0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)
    mono: mono_out=0x0
    inputs:

speaker-test works, and I can hear the white-noise on the devices
connected to these jacks.

Thinking that it might be a speaker-test limitation, I added the
following to /etc/asound.conf:

pcm.test {
    type plug
    slave {
        pcm {
                type hw
                card PCH
                channels 10
        }
    }
    ttable.0 { 0 1 }
    ttable.1 { 1 1 }
}

Yet, speaker-test still fails:

$ speaker-test -D test -c 2
...
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 2 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
ALSA lib pcm_params.c:2162:(snd1_pcm_hw_refine_slave) Slave PCM not usable
Broken configuration for playback: no configurations available: Invalid argument
Setting of hwparams failed: Invalid argument



So my questions are:
- Is it possible to use more than 8 output channels on an ALC1150?
- Is there a mechanism to have each output jack appear as its own
device/subdevice?

I'd like to utilise the jacks of my ALC1150 HDA device as separate
stereo outputs.
Ideally, I'd like the card/device to show up as multiple stereo
subdevices, one for each jack.
If that's not possible, I can use a combination of the plug plugin and
its channel remapping feature to create a new 2 channel pcm device for
each 2 channel pair on the master device.

Regards,
Adam