[Klug-general] Surround Sound

[Paul Littlefield]

On 21/04/11 17:42, Tom Carlson wrote:
> I don't own a sub nor a center speaker. My amp distributes the center
> channel stuff to the left and right channels and (probably) throws
> away the sub signal. If your game/movie/whatever is using the sub for
> anything but effects then it's doing it wrong :-)

Tom

I am only interested in watching movies with Surround Sound at this stage, and when I say "Surround Sound" then I mean true 5.1 - which is AC3 and how most DVDs (don't get me started on DTS Blu-Rays yet!) have their audio track... this means I should get sounds meant for each corner in their correct corner, extra bass where needed, music from all around and speech only from the center channel - hence 5.1.

I am running pre-movie tests using the programs aplay, speaker-test, and mplayer with various switches and varying degrees of success... the best being:-

$  mplayer -channels 6 -ao alsa:hw=0.0 ~/6_channel_audio.wav

which gives me "front left, front right, (center - muffled in subwoofer), back left, back right, and sub" in a nice female voice. Only 1 speaker wrong.

I know I am very close, and it's probably just a text file configuration or driver issue. I know I have cables plugged in correctly.

If I have to use PulseAudio, I'll use that but ALSA seems to be more widely used these days and if jumping to an unstable PPA to get 1.0.24+ fixes it then I will jump.

Watch this space.

Paully