Virtual Surround for stereo ...

How to:

I'm using ALSA 1.0.14, and the vdownmix plugin was introduced with ALSA 1.0.11, according to the changelogs. To make use of it, you'll have to install the plugins that ALSA ships first of course. The package in question should be called alsa-plugins, at least it does on the Red Hat- and Debian-style distros I use. Look for it in your package manager.

The documentation is surprisingly simple. Add the following to your ~/.asoundrc or /etc/asound.conf (create the file if it doesn't exist yet):



This will create two new sound devices that can be used by applications just as they would use your sound card directly, with the exception that these two process the audio through the vdownmix plugin. Yes, it should work with all ALSA-compatible apps, but they've got to be able to use 5.1 or 4.0 surround sound to benefit from it.

If you need to use a card other than the default sound device (like for using a USB headset), change the two slave.pcm "default" lines to slave.pcm "devicename", where devicename can be something like hw:0 for the first soundcard, hw:1 for the second, and so on. It can also be some other PCM device like dmix:CARD=1 (to use the second sound card through dmix).

Plug in your headphones and off you go: play something like a DVD with 5.1 audio in mplayer: mplayer -ao alsa -channels 6 dvd://1
There's no need to tell mplayer to use the device since it uses surround51 automatically if 6 channels are available. If you use a frontend for mplayer (such as SMPlayer), just tell it to use "alsa" for sound output and add -channels 6 to the mplayer command parameters.
Xine's default surround devices (so also Amarok's, Kaffeine's, etc.), plug:surround51:0 and plug:surround40:0, wouldn't work for me. Here you'll have to set your frontends to use plug:surround51 and plug:surround40 instead.
(no, mp3s are usually not in surround nor using more than 2 channels, so you can't test Amarok with them)

You can also test it with the speaker-test utility (usually in package alsa-utils, speaker-test in Mandriva): speaker-test -D surround51 -c 6

As for the effect itself, I think it does indeed give a nice surround effect. And yes, maybe that's just me being ignorant and I fail to realize that it actually sounds crappy. Therefor I won't make any promises and leave it to you to judge whether it's for you or not, but I recommend to at least give it a try with a movie or two.

Troubleshooting:

Now something I encountered while using vdownmix with my USB headset was that clipping occured because of too high playback volume. So I had to put softvol into the chain:



This may not be necessary for other people. You'll know whether you need it or not if your sound seems more distorted during volume peeks when using vdownmix. Decrease the new volume control's level to around 50% and all clipping should be gone (it was for me). Reducing the card's Master volume didn't help for me.
What's a bit bothersome about softvol however is that you first have to play something through the device it controls before the system recognizes the control (also mentioned on the inofficial ALSA Wiki. So play something first through vdownmix, then restart your mixer (alsamixer, kmix, kalsamix, etc.) and adjust the volume.

Happy listening!