[ALSA] surround 5.1 not working on Acer Aspire 8943G

Question

My laptop Acer 8943G has a ALC670 Realtek chip.
And it has built-in Dolby Home Theater 5.1 Cinematic Surround.
My problem is that I can't bring all the 5 speakers + subwoofer to work.
I'm using gnome3 (gnome-shell). In pulseaudio I see only surround 4.0, so speaker-test -Dsurround40 -c4 is working great and -Dsurround51 -c4 too but not with -c6:
[_artem_@linux-void ~]$ speaker-test -Dsurround40 -c4 -twav
speaker-test 1.0.24.2
Playback device is surround40
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 4 channels
WAV file(s)
Rate set to 48000Hz (requested 48000Hz)
Buffer size range from 32 to 8192
Period size range from 16 to 4096
Using max buffer size 8192
Periods = 4
was set period_size = 2048
was set buffer_size = 8192
0 - Front Left
1 - Front Right
3 - Rear Right
2 - Rear Left
Time per period = 5.717822
0 - Front Left
^C
[_artem_@linux-void ~]$ speaker-test -Dsurround51 -c6 -twav
speaker-test 1.0.24.2
Playback device is surround51
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 6 channels
WAV file(s)
Channels count (6) not available for playbacks: Invalid argument
Setting of hwparams failed: Invalid argument
[_artem_@linux-void ~]$
as pulse audio has no 5.1 profile for my hardware I decided to remove it completely, so I did.
now I have just alsa: speaker-test -D default -c6 -twav gives sound only on front-left, front-right, but it gives no error on hwparams
Yesterday on pulseaudio I got speaker-test -c6 -twav to give sound on all the speakers including LFE (subwoofer).
But that worked only with speaker-test, sound settings of gnome still gave me 4.0 profile where I could test only 4 channels.
That's why I wanted to play all the sounds directly through alsa without pulseaudio.
here is alsa-info
http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=4467f … 7f061397cb
here is alsamixer:
it has no options for channels, only FRONT (left-right) and SURROUND (left-right) no other controls, no  LFE, no CENTER, nothing.
the last thing I tried:
[_artem_@linux-void ~]$ cat .asoundrc
ctl.jack51 {
type hw
card 0
device 0
pcm.jack51 {
type asym
playback.pcm {
type plug
slave.pcm "surround51"
slave.channels 6
route_policy duplicate
capture.pcm {
type hw
card 0
device 0
[_artem_@linux-void ~]$
[_artem_@linux-void ~]$ sudo jackd -d alsa --device jack51 --inchannels 2 --outchannels 6
jackd 0.121.2
Copyright 2001-2009 Paul Davis, Stephane Letz, Jack O'Quinn, Torben Hohn and others.
jackd comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; see the file COPYING for details
could not open driver .so '/usr/lib/jack/jack_firewire.so': libffado.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
JACK compiled with System V SHM support.
loading driver ..
creating alsa driver ... jack51|jack51|1024|2|48000|2|6|nomon|swmeter|-|32bit
ALSA lib control.c:882:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL jack51
control open "jack51" (No such file or directory)
ALSA lib pcm.c:2212:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM jack51
ALSA lib pcm.c:2212:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM jack51
ALSA: Cannot open PCM device alsa_pcm for playback. Falling back to capture-only mode
cannot load driver module alsa
[_artem_@linux-void ~]$
I read already almost all the manuals but can't get it working, I played with default.pa, daemon.conf (both with pulseaudio) + .asoundrc
now since I delited pulseaudio completely, I tried everything with .asound + /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf (setting default card, manual setting the model) but nothing works.
I hope you can help me, because I have no idea what to do next
Last edited by _artem_ (2011-07-02 13:13:27)

Answer 1

I tried all the models from HD-Audio-Models.txt
ALC662/663/272
==============
3stack-dig 3-stack (2-channel) with SPDIF
3stack-6ch 3-stack (6-channel)
3stack-6ch-dig 3-stack (6-channel) with SPDIF
6stack-dig 6-stack with SPDIF
lenovo-101e Lenovo laptop
eeepc-p701 ASUS Eeepc P701
eeepc-ep20 ASUS Eeepc EP20
ecs ECS/Foxconn mobo
m51va ASUS M51VA
g71v ASUS G71V
h13 ASUS H13
g50v ASUS G50V
asus-mode1 ASUS
asus-mode2 ASUS
asus-mode3 ASUS
asus-mode4 ASUS
asus-mode5 ASUS
asus-mode6 ASUS
asus-mode7 ASUS
asus-mode8 ASUS
dell Dell with ALC272
dell-zm1 Dell ZM1 with ALC272
samsung-nc10 Samsung NC10 mini notebook
auto auto-config reading BIOS (default)
and I figured out that only this do something in the right direction...
[_artem_@linux-void ~]$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf
#options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-6ch
options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-6ch-dig
#options snd-hda-intel model=base
#options snd-hda-intel model=eeepc-ep20
[_artem_@linux-void ~]$
here is how the uncommented model looks like in alsamixer:
so I now have CENTER and LFE that are missing in the default alsa config (screenshot in first post)...
but speaker-test
[_artem_@linux-void ~]$ speaker-test -Dsurround51 -c6 -twav
speaker-test 1.0.24.2
Playback device is surround51
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 6 channels
WAV file(s)
Rate set to 48000Hz (requested 48000Hz)
Buffer size range from 64 to 5440
Period size range from 32 to 2720
Using max buffer size 5440
Periods = 4
was set period_size = 1088
was set buffer_size = 5440
0 - Front Left
4 - Center #silent
1 - Front Right
3 - Rear Right #silent
2 - Rear Left #silent
5 - LFE #silent
Time per period = 8.522361
rear left and rear right are always silent on model=3stack-6ch-dig even if I pass to the speaker-test -c4, on another model=*** with -c4 I could here all 4 speakers, but on -c6 only front left and front right (weird because they work on -c4 but on -c6 they are silent...)
if I set in alsamixer Channel Mode to 2 instead of 6, the above command gives me hwparameter error, so it's correcter than before because it can't play 6 channel on a "set to 2 channels hardware".
but I don't still know how to get "center", "rear-*" and "lfe" to give sound.
Maybe you know another models (names) that I can try. I have googled on alc670 alsa models but can't find anything related... one thing (saw in a patch diff that it's quiet "equal" to alc622 and alc272 that's why I tried all the models from above. and some of them are at least visually correcter than the default alsa detection: I mean they give me the correct parts (lfe, center), default one gives only Front and Surround).
p.s. I recompiled kernel with alsa support other ways I wasn't able to compile alsa-driver manually and had no cards to try different model options, because there was no kernel module for snd-hda-intel...