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Hector Martin authored
Short story: this laptop has 5.1 built-in speakers which you *really* want to use (the not-so-"sub" woofer is what makes the audio above average for a laptop), so 6-channel support is important (plus a decent asound.conf to upmix stereo). It also has the 3 typical jacks that ought to have a selectable mode. And it's based on ALC889, which sucks. Rationale/explanations: The const_channel_count stuff was added because, for a laptop like this, you always have 6 channels available (internal speakers) but still need to set the mode for the 3 external jacks. Therefore, the device always needs to be in 6-channel mode but there still needs to be a mixer control for the jack mode. You could use line/mic-in at the same time as the 6 internal speakers, for example. You might be tempted to make it even smarter by dynamically switching the max channel count when headphones are plugged in (therefore muting the internal speakers and reducing the physical channel count to the jack channel mode), but as a user I consider this to be harmful because I want the audio to blow up to 6 channels / upmixed as soon as I unplug the headphones, and having opened the device while in 2-channel mode would prevent this from working (and always making 6-channel mode available doesn't do any harm). The hardware needs EAPD turned on and the DACs routed to the internal speaker pins, so the patch adds those verbs. The ALC889 CLFE and subsequent (side/aux, here unused) DACs do NOT work by default, at least here. I wasted much time trying to talk to Realtek/pshou about this, but they just kept sending me useless updates to patch_realtek.c that did nothing relevant. In the end I gave up and brute forced the issue by trying to flip every bit in the proprietary coefficient registers, and eventually found the two magic registers that need to be cleared to enable all DACs. I have only heard Acer users complain, but that might be because ALC889 is pretty new and using 5.1 (and noticing the missing center/lfe channels) might not be that common. If this is a generalized issue with all ALC889 systems then those verbs should probably be moved to a common verb array. The internal mic is untested and probably doesn't work. These settings will probably work for other Acer Gemstone laptops with the same 5.1 speaker config. When identified, those should be added to the PCI subsystem ID list. Signed-off-by: Hector Martin <hector@marcansoft.com> Signed-off-by: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
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