here is a summary of my adventures with Alsa sound through SPDIF on my Abit NF7 nforce2 main board.
First I want to thank Takashi and James for their friendly and sedulous help. Without them, I would have gotten no sound to work through the SPDIF output at all.
In the end, we got almost everything to work, except for the loop-through from SPDIF in to SPDIF out. Unfortunately, this is a requirement for me, so I gave up and now installed an additional C-Media PCI CMI8738 sound card on my PC, which works perfectly right out of the box.
In particular, with the C-Media PCI CMI8738, alsamixer provides me with a "IEC958 Loop" switch, which I need to loop the digital sound output of my DVB card to the sound card output which is connected to my HiFi equipment.
Other things that I find *much* user-friendlier about Alsa with the CMI8738 compared to Alsa with the on-board nforce 2 sound include:
* The CMI8738 default device (hw:0.0) plays through both the analog output and the SPDIF output at the same time. No need to tweak defaults through a .asoundrc file. The nforce2 default device (hw:0.0) only plays through the analog output.
* All programs I tested (mpg123, alsaplayer, mpg321, kde desktop sound) simply worked with the CMI8738. No tweaking, no special parameters, no quirks. With nforce2 sound, I needed a different tweak for each of them (if one was available at all) and some were causing strange effects. See the previous mails in this thread.
So far my general remarks from a user perspective.
From a technical perspective, the nforce2 provides the following 8 IEC958 controls:
% amixer controls | fgrep IEC958 numid=50,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Input Monitor' numid=36,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Playback Con Mask' numid=37,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Playback Pro Mask' numid=40,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA' numid=38,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Playback Default' numid=39,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Playback Switch' numid=48,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Capture Switch' numid=49,iface=MIXER,name='Analog to IEC958 Output'
While the CMI8738 provides the following 11 IEC958 controls: % amixer controls | fgrep IEC958 numid=30,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 5V' numid=29,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Copyright' numid=32,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 In Monitor' numid=37,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 In Phase Inverse' numid=38,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 In Select' numid=28,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 In Valid' numid=31,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Loop' numid=36,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Mix Analog' numid=34,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Playback Con Mask',device=2 numid=27,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Output Switch' numid=33,iface=PCM,name='IEC958 Playback Default',device=2
note in particular that the IEC958 Loop is missing on the nforce2. Also, on the CMI8738, SPDIF out is available through hw:0,0 (the default for most programs), while the nforce2 only gave me access to the SPDIF out via hw:0,1 - and that was only 48kHz (a hardware attribute of the chip), so I had to use plughw:0,1 which caused other problems.
So, for now my problem is solved by installing an additional sound card - unfortunately at the expense of a precious PCI slot. :-(
Any work on Alsa that will make the nforce2 driver as good as the cmipci driver will be highly appreciated.
Cheers,
Carsten.
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