Sound out Rear but not Front or center speakers
 

Hi Everyone

I am very new to Linux; Just been playing with it a couple weeks now.
I found that I like Mandrake 9.1. I tryed RedHat 9.0 but could not get any sound at all or veiw my NTFS file in Win2000Pro. But with Mandrake I get sound out my rear speakers but not out my front or center speakers. I wanted to check my mixer settings but I do not know how, does anyone know what I can try to get the rest of my sound to work. I have a Asus P4P800 Delux mobo with ADI AD-1985 6-channel audio CODEC and Logitech Z640 5.1 surround sound speakers.

If you search this forum for the exact phrase "front speakers" you will find quite a few posts about this. I don't recall any examples of onboard sound with more than 2-channel stereo.

I have an AD1980 with supposedly similar powers, but the linux driver is just the old intel8x0. I looked at the source and saw nothing special in the AD1980 specific code.

People seem to have more luck with various soundblasters.

Incidentally, where do you plug the extra speakers in? My board just has the usual three jack sockets.

I plug the other speakers in the line-In & Mic jacks. That means I will not be able to use those for that.
I did try switching the plugs, It seems that just one of the jacks are putting out sound. I gess the driver may not suport 6 channel audio on this mobo. It does work fine in Win2000Pro. Maybe I need to find a new driver for Linux.

Well, ALSA (www.alsa-project.org) seems to be the way to go if you can get it installed and want the most up-to-date drivers. But that's what I'm using and still only get 2-channels with an AD1980. I've tried the other jack sockets also. There is quite a bit of info about status of individual chips on that site.

A lot of onboard chips just use the intel8x0 driver, which I think only uses older, backward-compatible features of these chips. Maybe the driver writers figure the audience is not big enough for the effort needed to write new drivers for every chip, or maybe the manufacturers are not releasing enough details to make it possible.

But SB Live and various successors have a big following, so I think their drivers have more features in this area.