After further research I can confirm that this behaviour is caused by a bug in Pulseaudio
checking with: pulseaudio --dump-conf it was clear that speakers where not recognised correctly from alsa layer (alsa worked fine, as was clear from several speaker tests (speaker-test -Dplug:surround51 -c6 -l1 -twav and the individual test from system>preferences>sound)) My audio device is onboard ALC892 audio device integrated in AMD 880G chipset. lspci shows: 00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) (rev 40) alsa-base is version 1.0.23+dfsg-1ubuntu4 pulseaudio is version 1:0.9.22~0.9.21+stable-queue-32-g8478-0ubuntu21.1 I've found the solution to my problem, add the following directives in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf: enable-lfe-remixing = yes default-sample-channels = 5 default-channel-map = front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right,front-center kill pulseaudio with: killall pulseaudio start pulseaudio again via launcher (ALT+F2), type pulseaudio [ENTER] The sound should now default correctly. Hopefully this will be usefull to someone, i'll now move my activities to the pulseaudio bugtracker. -- Totem uses Stereo sound while set at 5.1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/674730 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
