Realtek ALC888 5.1 Sound problems

Question

Hello everyone,
I have been using Arch with KDE for quite a bit now, but i'm still a stranger to the sound system (maybe i'm just dumb and all),
i have a GA-965P-DS3 motherboard with a Realtek ALC888 8 Channel Audio on it, i have an 5.1 plugged in the back and a headphone in the front.
I rearly use the 5.1, about a month or so. First i used just plain alsa and kMix, it was all fine, untill the native Steam client comed and i noticed that
all games are running in a 7.1 setup, so ... i installed pulseaudio (i never liked it, but ...), then it was all ok, untill some kernet update.
Now i have the following issue, when i boot Arch, I allways get the KDE multimedia warning that yada yada yada device is not available, do you want
to forget, yada yada yada ... and i have no audio at all. So i have to open kMix, and at the Audio Hardware Setup i need to chose Headphones (however
it can't remember this setting, i have to make this at every boot), so far ok, now comes the 5.1, at headphone i have 2 channels at the 5.1 pluged in at
the back of the PC, when i chose 5.1 or whatever i have absolutly no sound at all (the channels are mutted every time i change the profile/connector
in kMix, i unmute them, even tried in alsamixer, everything unmuted, no sound once so ever, even tried the speaker-test -c 6 , speaker-test -c 2 nothing,
it only works on "headphones" connector and two channels). Here is an image of kMix:
fuser -fv /dev/snd/* /dev/dsp*
Specified filename /dev/dsp* does not exist.
USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC0: user 407 F.... kded4
user 661 F.... kmix
user 751 F.... pulseaudio
lsmod | grep '^snd' | column -t
snd_hda_codec_realtek 62279 1
snd_hda_intel 33946 5
snd_hda_codec 101474 2 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel
snd_hwdep 6364 1 snd_hda_codec
snd_pcm 76956 2 snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel
snd_page_alloc 7298 2 snd_pcm,snd_hda_intel
snd_timer 18687 1 snd_pcm
snd 58893 16 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hwdep,snd_timer,snd_pcm,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel
ls -l /dev/snd
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 60 Apr 29 00:33 by-path
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 8 Apr 29 00:33 controlC0
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 7 Apr 29 00:33 hwC0D2
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 6 Apr 29 08:41 pcmC0D0c
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 5 Apr 29 23:24 pcmC0D0p
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 4 Apr 29 00:33 pcmC0D1c
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 3 Apr 29 00:33 pcmC0D1p
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 2 Apr 29 00:33 pcmC0D2c
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 116, 1 Apr 29 00:33 seq
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 33 Apr 29 00:33 timer
Anyone any ideas on how to get the 5.1 working? thank you, help is appreciated.
Last edited by LyCC (2013-04-29 21:54:01)

Answer 1

which audio drivers have you tried?
have you tried these yet?
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_audio_4.62_win2kxp.html