Help configuring PulseAudio for 2.1 on laptop [SOLVED]

Question

Hello
I've been trying to figure out how to properly configure PulseAudio for my laptop for the past couple of nights, but haven't had much luck.  I'm may be misunderstanding my laptop's audo setup correctly.  Seeing stuff like True 5.1, Dobly Home Theater, and Virtual SurroundSound confused me, but right now I think 5.1 is only for HDMI output (which I don't use).  My laptop has a so-called subwoofer and in alsamixer I have controls for front and lfe.
By default, pulseaudio chooses stereo, which sounds fine for anything that stereo or mono, but if I play a DVD in VLC I can barely hear voices and but hear parts of music and background sounds.
Also, for some reason if I run speaker-test -c 2 -t wav.  Front-left is loud and somewhat distorted while Front-right is really soft.  Yet it still sounds fine (to me) when listening to non-surround content.
Everything worked perfectly before pulseaudio was pulled in.
I tried following this post on manually loading the alsa sources and sink modules, but it didn't work.
Running pulseaudio in verbose mode showed that hw:0 doesn't support 3 channels and then defaults to stereo.
default-sample-channels = 3
default-channel-map = front-left,front-right,lfe
I also just tried the above in daemon.conf just to see what would happen but, it ignored it... 
What am I doing wrong?  Am I going about this the wrong way?
Any help would be much appreciated.
More information:
My laptop series/specs:
http://support.acer.com/acerpanam/noteb … 0sp2.shtml
uname -a
Linux archlaptop 3.0-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Oct 19 12:14:48 UTC 2011 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) X2 Dual-Core QL-62 AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC888 Analog [ALC888 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: ALC888 Digital [ALC888 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
default.pa
### Load audio drivers statically
### (it's probably better to not load these drivers manually, but instead
### use module-udev-detect -- see below -- for doing this automatically)
#load-module module-alsa-sink
#load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:1,0
#load-module module-oss device="/dev/dsp" sink_name=output source_name=input
#load-module module-oss-mmap device="/dev/dsp" sink_name=output source_name=input
#load-module module-null-sink
#load-module module-pipe-sink
load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0 channels=3 channel_map=front-left,front-right,lfe
### Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
#.ifexists module-udev-detect.so
#load-module module-udev-detect
#.else
### Use the static hardware detection module (for systems that lack udev/hal support)
#load-module module-detect
#.endif
Last edited by Vortalex (2011-11-14 05:20:52)

Answer 1

Update.
I got vlc to work right.  Yay!
I deleted my .vlc directory
Then, manually set the output to alsa (and set Device to Default) which then ungrayed the Audio > Audio Device menu to select Stereo
edit:
I noticed I loose audio in VLC if I pause or seek around too much...   Work around for now is to disable and reenable the audio.
looking with pavucontol vlc is still there, it just doesn't do anything.
anyway, this new problem is probably for a different thread
Last edited by Vortalex (2011-11-14 06:34:33)