[pulseaudio-discuss] Headless "Speaker Server" Configuration

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sat, 2013-01-26 at 16:16 -0800, Justin Chudgar wrote:
> I've been looking at the docs on system mode and am confused about how
> to setup a headless speaker server. I have a very large room wired with
> in-wall ethernet, but not audio. I would prefer to use an old headless
> PC as a "speaker server" -- a sink for the rear-left and rear-right
> channels instead of having to run lots of heavy gauge speaker wire.

I don't think this is currently possible. You'd need module-combine-sink
for combining the front and the rear speakers, but module-combine-sink
doesn't support selecting some channels for one output and some other
channels for another output.

Even if module-combine-sink supported such splitting (it shouldn't be
hard to implement, if you feel like contributing patches), there would
still probably be issues with timing. I'd imagine that good surround
experience would require very good synchronization, and I don't think
module-combine-sink provides that. (It does provide some
synchronization, but from what I've heard, it's far from perfect.)

> Using Ubuntu server as a base, I've been trying to get pulseaudio to
> work as a system instance and have thoroughly failed. Could someone
> please help with configuration advice.

Some details about what you've tried and what errors you're getting
would be useful (if you still want to run pulseaudio in the system mode,
given what I said above).

-- 
Tanu