I have a Soundblaster Live! Value card, using the emu10k1 drivers... I have a 4 speaker + subwoofer system (Altec Lansing ACS54).... running RedHat 9

Now, when I first installed RH9 (3 weeks ago), I had similar problems, which I solved by fiddling around with the speaker cable setup (I disconnected the cable that connected the front speakers to the soundcard, and voila, I could hear quadraphonic sound).

But, all of a sudden now, I am back at one: I can only hear sound from my two front speakers... The last thing I did before it got screwed up was install Xine..... I am now wondering if that had anything to do with it.

Can anyone help me? Thanks in advance.

I have almost the same setup on my box, but I haven't persued getting surround sound. You need to have a file with surround in the mix. Standard audio files only carry stereo information. However if your have a seperate reciever it can convert it to prologic, prologicII, or one of many dsp's. But I believe with computer speaker setups the audio system would have to do the converting.

Thanks for your reply linuXBOX. Are you telling me that I need some software that could instruct the computer to send out quadraphonic sound?

What I don't get is how come it functioned properly just yesterday and then all of a sudden it went back to how it was in the beginning?

That I'm not sure about. But what I do know is that a computer can only do exactly what it's told, and in other words if worked one day, but not the next, something changed. Plain and simple. So you need to find out what changed between the two days.

I figured out what was wrong... apparently my very much annoying little sister messed around with my speaker cable configuration... put it back to where it was and, like magic, quadraphonic sound. thanks for the help though... I hate it when nobody replies to my questions.

sure, no prob...btw so can i do the same? i haven't touched my sound settings, but i love to mess around. What special settings did you enable?

oh it was nothing special really...

the ACS54 speaker system brings two speaker connectors... a green one for the rear speakers and a black one for the front speakers... these cables are connected to the back of the subwoofer... anyway, originally (before installing linux) i had both cables connected to my sound card (soundblaster live! value), black to black, green to green.

With this cable configuration I could only hear the front speakers, so I messed around with the cables and accidentally (like all discoveries) I left the black cable (the one that connects the front speakers) unconnected.... so I played a cd and sound came out of the 4 speakers... So right now I only have the green cable (that connects the rear speakers) plugged in the green slot of the soundcard... it works perfectly.

Hope that helps at least a bit. I've read somewhere that some people don't get sound unless they connect the cables to the MIC or AUX jacks in the soundcard... that didn't apply to me though.