Unable to play 5.1 surround sound through PC

Forgive me if anything is wrong as i am posting for the first time here also mentioned my issue on reddit.

I have installed Manjaro on a dell laptop which works super awesome i loved it so i installed it on my PC which is also an dell inspiron 620s the problem im having is the bass and surround speakers are super low (i use a sony sound system which connects to the pc through the line out port). I researched many guides online but to no avail!! My system uses ALSA and PulseAudio, the chipset detected by lspci is “Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200” Previously my machine had Win10 and everything played perfectly the surround speakers and the subwoofer were loud enough.

Feel free to ask my terminal outputs anything you guys need as i am in a bit of hurry to get it fixed.

Edit: Ah yes also the speaker-test only outputs front left and front right and all others are displayed as unused and make no sound.

Welcome to the forum! :wave:

Please post your system info as outlined here:

Try adding the following to ~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf (create it if it doesn’t exist):

resample-method = soxr-vhq
default-sample-channels = 6
default-sample-format = s32le
default-sample-rate = 48000
alternate-sample-rate = 44100
remixing-produce-lfe = yes
remixing-consume-lfe = yes
lfe-crossover-freq = 80

Line out is stereo analog two channel front left and front right. To get more channels you would need to use additional analog connections(if you have them) or a coax/optical connection can do a dolby digital or dts surround signal to a receiver(but in pure PCM it is two channel only) or an HDMI connection which can have more channels of pure PCM than you use.

There is a type of surround made by Dolby that gets worked into a 2 channel signal and then decoded into a single surround channel using out of phase signals in the stereo signal and of course bass could be redirected with a crossover to the subwoofer. This was used on older VHS movies. I’m suspecting if you somehow managed to get a surround signal from your Windows PC that it would have to either have been done this way or similar, or some type of surround stereo mode on your surround system that plays the same sounds all around you and not distinct ones.

You said you had it connected to Line-out is that just the one single 3.5mm connection or do you have others for the other channels. For my PC I also have a 3.5mm for centre/subwoofer ; surround left/surround right ; and back right and back left.

Din’t work. I’m still browsing the internet should i try pipewire? Also how can windows handle this and linux can’t i mean i wanted to know the working of this??

Yes as you said my pc has only 1 line out and the sound system which processes the 5.1 sound has a 2.1 jack coming out of it on which when i had windows played 5.1 sound.
Also as you mentioned that you use 5.1 surround speakers do you experience really low or absolutely no noise from the rear left/right and subwoofer? Also do you have a separate system for managing the 5.1 like i have?

You don’t have a true 5.1 source coming to the system. So the system would be faking it. The Line-Out jack can only send 2 channels of PCM to a receiver/amp/powered speakers. Maybe your system was better able to fake it with the signal you have on windows I don’t know. But it wasn’t real surround if it was just the line-out jack.

This page might give you a better visual representation of what the different connectors do.