Hi,
I hope I'm not doing anything wrong by responding an old threat but I recently managed to get my SoundBlasterX AE-5 (
not Plus, though it might be worth it seeing if this works for plus cards as well) running on Linux Mint 22 (kernel 6.8.0) with
proper analog 5.1 surround. After nearly giving up on Linux because of AE-5, I wanted to share my joy and specific observations.
To my amazement, the sound card worked
nearly out of the box on LM22, which was amazing considering it didn't work at all on LM21 (a regression bug in kernel 5.15) after previously sort of working reasonably well on LM20 with some heavy workarounds.
It is my conclusion that Pulseaudio being replaced with Pipewire is the reason LM22 performs so well with AE-5 as reverting back to pulseaudio once again causes a flood of BDL entries overload and the card doesn't work just like in LM21. I have no idea why pulseaudio should do this. If I understand philosophy of sound architecture on Linux, pulseaudio shouldn't even be directly touching the card. But for some reason, it is.
So use Pipewire, avoid Pulseaudio. With pipewire, I get a single BDL entry in dmesg every time the sound server starts but it works normally after that.
All I had to do to get 5.1 analog working was go to alsamixer and set the "Output Select" to "speakers" (it defaulted to "headphones", for some reason) and "Surround Channel Config" to "5.1" (default is "2.1"). In the sound control panel, you should select "Analog surround 5.1" hardware profile for the AE-5. And that was it to get the card working in analog 5.1.
Now couple of caveats and the reason why I originally said the card worked "nearly" out of the box.
1. Messed up 5.1 channel mapping. This has been the a problem even on LM20. For some reason, the central/LFE and RL/RR channels are switched and seems to be a primarily ALSA problem.
I have fixed this by creating a file 10-remap.conf and putting it in ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d. With this content:
Code:
context.modules = [
{ name = libpipewire-module-loopback
args = {
node.description = "5.1 Remapped"
capture.props = {
node.name = "5.1_remap_c"
media.class = Audio/Sink
audio.position = [ FL FR RL RR FC LFE ]
}
playback.props = {
node.name = "5.1_remap_p"
audio.position = [ FL FR FC LFE RL RR ]
node.target = "alsa_output.pci-0000_06_00.0.analog-surround-51"
#note that the above target device may not always be the same. use pw-link -o to find node target names (ignore the part after the colon)
}
}
}
]
Note that the sound test in the sound control panel still comes out wrong for some reason. However, the remapping appears to work everywhere else where I tested it (firefox/VLC/speaker-test)
2. No 5.1 upmixing from stereo sources (e.g. youtube). This is apparently a "feature" of pipewire. If you have a stereo source, sound will come only from the front speakers. If you are like me (and I dare say a majority) and prefer 5.1 Surround for the SURROUND part, then you will wish to enable upmixing, you know, to actually get any use out of the 5.1 surround as 99% of audio sources will be stereo (seriously, I have no idea why it would be set up by default in this way...)
Anyway, I did this by creating a file pipewire-pulse.conf and putting it in ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d. With this content:
Code:
stream.properties = {
channelmix.upmix = true
channelmix.upmix-method = simple # none, simple, psd
channelmix.lfe-cutoff = 150
channelmix.fc-cutoff = 12000
channelmix.rear-delay = 0.0
}
NOTE THE DIFFERENT FOLDER. For some reason, pipewire is quite anal about putting settings in several different places while the documentation is shoddy at best. I have spent as much time searching for a fix as I did trial-erroring what goes where.
3. When I dual boot to Windows 10 by restarting my LM22 and booting to Win10, I get a distorted sound. That happened also with LM20. Whatever Linux does screws up the sound card on hardware level. A workaround is to shutdown the computer instead of restarting and booting to Win10 after turning it back on. Slightly inconvenient but I learned to live with it.
And that's it.
Been running my AE-5 on LM22 for several days with no problem. Analog 5.1 works, headphone jack works. No problems so far other than the stuff I noted above. Hope this helps somebody.
