SOLVED: sound from rear speakers only with aplay?

[pbhj]

I've been trying to get my front/rear speakers to work together. Using aplay and speaker-test (as suggested in this thread) from a console I can do:

aplay -vv -D plug:surround40 /usr/share/sounds/pop.wav

speaker-test -D plug:surround40 -t wav -c4

All 4 speakers are working.

Also if I choose in the KDE multimedia section of systemsettings then one of the output devices listed says "rear speakers" and the test button will play sound from the rear speakers but cuts off the front speakers as it does. None of the options play sound from both sets of speakers.

I'm using the default sound system installed which appears to be a mix of pulseaudio and alsa and xine. Sound in KDE seems a real mess of about 5 different layers of programs.

Looking elsewhere I've found that changing the number of channel-samples in the pulse-daemon.conf has fixed things for some. So I did that and have checked using alsamixer, kmix, pavucontrol, alsamixerui to be sure that I'm not missing a muted channel or anything - which seems unlikely given the tests at the top are working.

So, any suggestions?

(I'm thinking software suggestions, this thread says get a splitter, I'd rather it just worked!)

This might help:

user@localhost:~$ aplay -lL
front:CARD=AudioPCI,DEV=0   
  Ensoniq AudioPCI, ES1370 DAC1
  Front speakers        
rear:CARD=AudioPCI,DEV=0     
  Ensoniq AudioPCI, ES1370 DAC2/ADC
  Rear speakers          
surround40:CARD=AudioPCI,DEV=0    
  Ensoniq AudioPCI, ES1370 DAC2/ADC
  4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
null                       
  Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
pulse                                
  Playback/recording through the PulseAudio sound server      
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****             
card 0: AudioPCI [Ensoniq AudioPCI], device 0: ES1370/1 [ES1370 DAC2/ADC]
 Subdevices: 1/1                            
 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0                       
card 0: AudioPCI [Ensoniq AudioPCI], device 1: ES1370/2 [ES1370 DAC1]  
 Subdevices: 1/1                            
 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

The same problem as http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1334379 it appears.

[pbhj]

Re: sound from rear speakers only with aplay?

Oh, it's always the same, I've fixed it! Lol.

Following the thread http://old.nabble.com/PCI-Express-SB...d24527789.html I thought to make a ~/.asoundrc file (not sure what part of the sound stack this is configuring) as follows:

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "surround40"
slave.channels 4
route_policy duplicate
}

Again I don' t know what this is doing I'm just copying the technique of the above link but for surround40 and 4 channels.