Why It Took So Long For Linux To Properly Handle 2.1 Speaker Systems

Canonical's David Henningsson wrote a blog post today explaining why it's taken until this year for Linux to properly support 2.1 speaker systems (two speakers and a subwoofer) with ALSA and PulseAudio.

While the open-source Linux sound stack has supported more complicated surround sound setups with a greater number of speakers, 2.1 hasn't been supported right since ALSA previously relied upon fixed mapping of channels that would cause various issues.

Fortunately, the issues have been overcome in months past thanks to the new ALSA channel map API, PulseAudio gaining a bass/treble filter, and other improvements found in PulseAudio 7 and the latest ALSA along with recent versions of the Linux kernel.

Goldmund's Media Room: A Dream For Audiophiles... I doubt ALSA + PulseAudio would work well here either.

To find out more, read this blog post.