How to enable surround 5.1 output on laptop

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Thursday 10 December 2009 00:20:51 Major Péter wrote:
> 2009-12-09 23:15 keltezéssel, Marko Vojinovic írta:
> > On Wednesday 09 December 2009 21:53:51 Major Péter wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop, which has two headphone output and
> >> one mic input, see picture:
> >> http://images.techtree.com/ttimages/story/87259_frontcombo.jpg
> >>
> >> On my winxp, I can do, that the left jack goes to the front speakers,
> >> the center jack goes to the center speaker, and the right jack goes to
> >> the rear speakers and everything works great.
> >> But on Linux I can't even make work the second headphone jack. :(
> >> What should I do to enable 5.1 on Fedora too?
> >
> > From http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/FAQ :
> >
> > <quote>
> > I have a surround sound card, but PulseAudio uses just the front
> > speakers!
> >
> > Many people have a surround card, but have speakers for just two
> > channels, so PulseAudio can't really default to a surround setup. To
> > enable all the channels, edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf: uncomment the
> > default-sample-channels line (i.e. remove the semicolon from the
> > beginning of the line) and set the value to 6 if you have a 5.1 setup, or
> > 8 if you have 7.1 setup etc. After doing the edit, restart pulseaudio.
> > </quote>
> 
> Thanks, but this is only good for people who has 5.1 sound card and
> wants to play all of the channels on their 2.0 speakers.

No, you misunderstood. Majority of people have only two speakers, so the 
*default* setup is to enable only front left&right channels for output. 
However, if you *do* have more speakers and want to enable all 6 channels for 
output, then you should edit the /etc/pulse/daemon.conf file as instructed.

This is precisely what you want to do, if you want to enable 5.1 output.

Best, :-)
Marko

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