How do i enable surround sound in pulseaudio?

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How do i enable analog surround sound? Is analog surround possible? If not is there a way i can enable some kind of virtual surround?

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There are many ways.

  1. If you use a receiver, there are often pseudo surround settings that work from 2 channel audio and work well for watching TV (I like Neo:6 cinema).
  2. For multichannel audio, passthrough is an option. Playing movies in Plex player, or mpv player, that offer 6 channel AAC, I generally see 6 channels of sound.
  3. For encoded surround (Dolby or DTS) then there are generally passthrough options (with MPV I had to edit the config to suit my HDMI output and with Plex there are ‘passthrough’ tick boxes, and Plex wsorks best played through ALSA as surround doesn’t work well in Pulse.

For mpv, I edited .config/mpv/mpv.conf
added:

audio-spdif=dts-hd,truehd,eac3,ac3
# use alsa for audio output
audio-device='alsa/hdmi:CARD=HDMI,DEV=1'
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your laptop only has 2 speakers and a headset jack so it cannot support more than 2 channels of analog audio

Virtual surround for headphones is possible with some audio processing packages

But I would suggest you also check out the Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural DSP plugin in Audacious or XMMS players
If you like how that sounds there is a LADSPA plugin ladspa-bs2b to apply the same audio processing for other audio streams

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This is true - unless you want to watch a movie, then you need to plug in a HDMI cable connected to your receiver/TV.

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