Friday, September 18, 2009

Linux analog surround on a GA-E7AUM-DS2H

This took me quite some effort while it's actually very simple. So let's share this, shall we? :D

  1. Install the latest and greatest ALSA stuff (script)
  2. Make sure you don't have any /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc laying around
  3. Use alsamixer to do the following settings:
  • Unmute everything! (using m)
  • Mute all S/PDIF (not really necessary, but won't hurt)
  • Set channel to 6 or 8
If you don't use your TV as center (why not?), you're done. If you do, and have it connected using HDMI, you need to alter the EDID it gives to X. This is because your Nvidia driver will give it an empty pcm stream causing your TV to not accept analogue audio any more. You can read about this flaw here.

Now test your setup:

speaker-test -Dsurround51 -c 6 -twav

If you are using Xbmc, you might want to change the 'default' audio device to 'surround51' or 'surround71'.

Labels: