Virtual Surround Sound with USB headsets on GNU/Linux

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I have two USB headsets, an HP Pavilion Gaming 600 and another one from
JMTek LLC. Both are supposed to support virtual surround sound (7.1),
only on Windows 10 for the first one, also on GNU/Linux for the latter.

My problem is that no matter how hard I tried on both Ubuntu 20.04.1 and
Fedora 36, I get only two channels. Stereo works, the mic works, but no
surround sound. Pavucontrol shows Digital Stereo (IEC958) S/PDIF and
alsamixer only shows two channels after selecting the relevant card by
hitting F6.

lsusb displays the following for the JMTek headset:
Bus 003 Device 117: ID 0c76:161f JMTek, LLC. USB PnP Audio Device
and according to the linux-hardware database, it's rather common.

If someone else has faced a similar issue, what could be the problem?
Hardware compatibility, software or some setting gone wrong? At worst,
could you suggest a reasonably priced headset that supports at least 5.1
audio (AC-3). Thanks in advance.


Crosspost to comp.os.linux.misc and comp.os.linux.hardware, follow-up to
comp.os.linux.hardware.

[Marco Moock]

Post by Anonymous
My problem is that no matter how hard I tried on both Ubuntu 20.04.1
and Fedora 36, I get only two channels. Stereo works, the mic works,
but no surround sound. Pavucontrol shows Digital Stereo (IEC958)
S/PDIF and alsamixer only shows two channels after selecting the
relevant card by hitting F6.

I am not an expert in PulseAudio and ALSA, but try the following:

Edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

default-sample-channels need to be set to the amount of channels. For
7.1, choose 8.

default-sample-channels = 8

enable-lfe-remixing must be set to yes.

enable-lfe-remixing = yes

Then restart PulseAudio and try it again.

I got that info from this German website:
https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/PulseAudio/#Surround-Sound

[Anonymous]

Post by Marco Moock
Edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

Thanks, but that didn't work, I still see Digital Stereo output with
only two channels. The more it goes, the more it's starting to feel like
the bad old days of winmodems...

I think I'll give the HyperX Cloud II a try and return it if I can't get
it to work since I've read reports that it just works out of the box.

[Marco Moock]

Post by Anonymous
Thanks, but that didn't work

Try

sudo apt-get install libasound2-plugins-extra

[Anonymous]

Post by Marco Moock
Try
sudo apt-get install libasound2-plugins-extra

Thank you for replying. The command returns:
libasound2-plugins-extra is already the newest version (1.1.0-1ubuntu2).

[Adrian Caspersz]

Post by Anonymous

Post by Marco Moock
Try
sudo apt-get install libasound2-plugins-extra

libasound2-plugins-extra is already the newest version (1.1.0-1ubuntu2).

There is a plugin to enable and configure.

https://www.alsa-project.org/wiki/A52_plugin


https://fossies.org/linux/alsa-plugins/doc/a52.txt


Googling keywords like "A52 pulseaudio" should get you somewhere. Even I
managed it :)