It started like this. When my kid plays a youtube song, it works great, great beat (as much as youtube can be), everything is fine. Then, when he wants to listen to an interview on youtube, (somebody talking, i.e speech), the sound can't be heard. Spooky, eh! Actually, you could hear it, but so silent that it's barely audible. I didn't believe until I heard it myself.
Well, given the experience, I know how to test it:
speaker-test -t wav -c 6
and this is what I get: 0 - Front Left - loud and clear, but on both sides, not only on the left
4 - Center - NOTHING, actually something barely audible
1 - Front Right - loud and clear, but on both sides, not only on the right
3 - Rear Right - very silent, barely audible, both sides
2 - Rear Left - very silent barely audible, both sides
5 - LFE - nothing.
You might want to know that Center worked few days ago, and Front Left was heard on the left earphone, and Front Right was heard on the right earphone not on both (and I doubt that the 9-year old kid messed up something).
I also found another command to test:
aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav
It actually produces a barely audible sound. Almost nothing.Then, I ran
hdajackretask
(I wish I didn't) and checked the Override box below Green Line Out, Rear side, and selected Headphone, same thing - center doesn't play. When I select Override with Line out (Front) it doesn't even produce anything audible. Even worse, when I wanted to return to the way how it was, i.e. I un-checked Override box, it didn't work at all! Nothing at all! Which is worse than before. I think I "broke" something by doing this Override check-uncheck things. Even after rebooting the machine, it is still not working (I mean to get it work, every time I have to open hdajackretask
, check Override box below Green Line Out, Rear side, and select Headphone, which is not really convenient). One more thing, having some sort of fetish for headphone jacks, I figured out that if I unplug headphone jacks half-way it would work. And yes, it does work if I unplug half-way, but it's not a stable condition (if kid moves cable, he loses the sound, not to mention that he would have to open
hdajackretask
and do the Override thing every time when he logs in). Is there a way to send the sound to the center too? And to return
hdajackretask
to how it was before? I tried to find similar topic (searched for "speaker-test Center"), but didn't find my problem described, hence this post.