[pulseaudio-discuss] ALC892 on Clevo P150HM and too many (?) options in pavucontrol

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Julian Sikorski at 19/06/11 09:38 did gyre and gimble:
> Hi,
> 
> this should be the final thread concerning this laptop. As I mentioned
> earlier, it has 2.1 speakers, a built-in microphone and the following
> connectors:
> - headphone out
> - microphone in; can be switched to center/lfe out
> - spdif out; can be switched to rear speaker out
> - line in; can be switched to side speaker out
> pavucontrol offers more options, some of which seem superfluous. In the
> output devices tab, you can pick from analog speakers, analog output and
> analog headphones (last 2 seem the same).

These elements come directly from ALSA. Your amixer -c0 output will
probably show that the relevant kcontrols exist to enable all these
ports. It's perhaps something that needs to be removed from alsa to
prevent it bubbling up to PA?

> In the input devices tab, you
> can pick microphone 1, microphone 2 and linear input. While it seems
> technically right (I don't have an external mic here to test), could it
> be possible to rename them to internal and external mic? #2 is the
> internal one.

Yeah, this is actually already the case in git master. The original
reasoning is that the ALSA controls are very often mislabelled or
lacking sufficient information to determine which is which (even if some
hardware is labelled fine, we aim to provide a consistent experience to
everyone even if that's not as perfect as it could be on some given
hardware!).

David has been pushing a lot of fixes to the ALSA layer to fix the
naming and thus Internal vs External Mic labels are now what is shown in
PA too.

> Finally, the profiles in the Configuration tab do not seem to reflect
> that the machine is capable of up to 7.1 sound. I have
> - analog stereo duplex
> - analog stereo output
> - digital stereo output (iec598) and analog stereo input
> - digital stereo duplex (iec598)
> - analog stereo input
> - off
> in there. This seems to be completely off what windows offers, so I hope
> the information I provided will be enough to fix the profiles.
> Otherwise, I am happy to provide more data.

We simply try to open the alsa "devices" surround51, surround71 etc. to
work out if the card is capable of 5.1 or 7.1 sound. If this fails the
profiles are not offered. I would suggest that there may be some special
switch you need to turn on in alsa to enable surround51 to work properly
(I have seen this on some h/w). At the moment we don't handle this too
well, so we probably need to work out a way of doing this.

The output from amixer -c0 would likely offer some clues.

Cheers

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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