Sound Blaster Live 5.1

[drspin]

Hey all!!

I just purchased a new speaker system for my puter -- it's 5.1!! w00t

Unfortunately it seems that I'm having some difficulty making this work right -- mostly relating to the digial/analog jack -- It doesn't seem to output the center channel or subwoofer channels as it's supposed to according to Creative's website.

First of all, is there a way I can reset the card/driver to a defaults state so that while I'm tinkering with stuff I can figure it out?

Second, has anyone been able to get the center/sub output working properly?

thanks -- Cole

[LondoJowo]

Using an Audigy 2 ZS in SuSE 9.3 I launched Kmix, adjusted the surround and center to max. I have sound coming from all speakers.

[drspin]

Thanks for the reply but I have tried nearly every combination in the mixer I can think of -- I have also noticed that the ALSA driver hasn't tied the WAVE surround to the MASTER or PCM or WAVE volumes -- how annoying!!

[LondoJowo]

Here's some info that may help you.
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=emu10k1

[TheDarthJysky]

I had the same problem for a looooooooong time but now i have solved it. You have to put in your /etc/asound.conf

pcm.ch51dup {
type route
slave.pcm surround51
slave.channels 6
ttable.0.0 1
ttable.1.1 1
ttable.0.2 1
ttable.1.3 1
ttable.0.4 0.5
ttable.1.4 0.5
ttable.0.5 0.5
ttable.1.5 0.5
}

And in kmix or whatevermix you should put Surround Center and LFE to minimum, those are only mirrorings from front channels. after that you can test your 5.1 surround by

"speaker-test -D surround51 -c 6"

if it works you have working surround system. You should know that you have to configure all programs that you want to use 5.1 surround to use surround51 and most of them need to know howmany speakers you have, for example you need start mplayer with "mplayer -channels 6 -ao alsa:device=surround51" I hope that this will help you.