[alsa-devel] Surround problems on ALC883

[Takashi Iwai]

At Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:42:42 +0200,
Pavel Patz wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I have problems with chip Realtek ALC883 (lspci: 00:06.1 Audio device: nVidia 
> Corporation MCP55 High Definition Audio (rev a2)) and surround sound.
> 
> Stereo sound is working (games, music) fine - all 6 speaker are playing.
> 
> But when I tried to run "aplay chan-id.wav", i've heard only "front left" 
> (front & rear left + center were playing) and "front right" (right front & 
> rear were playing), then was silence until the end of the file.
> 
> Running "aplay -Dsurround51 chan-id.wav" causes that aplay hangs-up without 
> any output. Running it with -v parameter produces this output:
> 
> Playing WAVE 'Desktop/Surround-SDL-testfiles/chan-id.wav' : Signed 16 bit 
> Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz, Channels 6
> Soft volume PCM
> Control: PCM Playback Volume
> min_dB: -51
> resolution: 256
> Its setup is:
>   stream       : PLAYBACK
>   access       : RW_INTERLEAVED
>   format       : S16_LE
>   subformat    : STD
>   channels     : 6
>   rate         : 44100
>   exact rate   : 44100 (44100/1)
>   msbits       : 16
>   buffer_size  : 5460
>   period_size  : 1365
>   period_time  : 30952
>   tick_time    : 1000
>   tstamp_mode  : NONE
>   period_step  : 1
>   sleep_min    : 0
>   avail_min    : 1365
>   xfer_align   : 1365
>   start_threshold  : 5460
>   stop_threshold   : 5460
>   silence_threshold: 0
>   silence_size : 0
>   boundary     : 6147413491360727040
> Slave: Hardware PCM card 0 'HDA NVidia' device 0 subdevice 0
> Its setup is:
>   stream       : PLAYBACK
>   access       : MMAP_INTERLEAVED
>   format       : S16_LE
>   subformat    : STD
>   channels     : 6
>   rate         : 44100
>   exact rate   : 44100 (44100/1)
>   msbits       : 16
>   buffer_size  : 5460
>   period_size  : 1365
>   period_time  : 30952
>   tick_time    : 1000
>   tstamp_mode  : NONE
>   period_step  : 1
>   sleep_min    : 0
>   avail_min    : 1365
>   xfer_align   : 1365
>   start_threshold  : 5460
>   stop_threshold   : 5460
>   silence_threshold: 0
>   silence_size : 0
>   boundary     : 6147413491360727040
> 
> 
> and then hang up until i press ctrl+c.
> Same results i get with speaker-test.

Looks like the stream setup doesn't match with your device.

> I'm using alsa-lib-1.0.14-0.4.rc3.fc7

The more important thing is the version of ALSA driver you're using.
Try the latest ALSA version (not released one), HG version, at first.
If you don't want / have HG, try the daily snapshot tarball below:
	ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/alsa/snapshot/

Then check whether it's a supported device or not.  If yours is an
unsupported one, you'll see a kernel messages like "unknown model,
using BIOS..."
Anyway, you can try different model option value for snd-hda-intel
module, as listed in Documentation/ALSA-Configuration.txt.


Takashi