Most sound comes from one speaker

[arpruss]

Here's a weird Fedora 9 problem (was ok with 8). At first I thought it was that all the sound was coming from my left speaker, and nothing was coming from the right speaker. (And the speakers are fine. They are 2.0 speakers, plugged in with a 3.5mm connector.) But after some time, I discovered something weirder than that. The right speaker isn't silent. Some low-pitched sound comes from it! I suspect what is happening is that the left channel gets routed to the left speaker, as it should be, but that somehow the sound driver is routing the .1 bass to the right speaker, and dropping the right channel, instead of mixing the .1 bass into the signal for both speakers.

How do I fix these kinds of routings?

The sound card is:
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 12)

[JohnVV]

i take it you have looked for the obvious like.
r-click the sound icon and select " open volume control".Under the sliders is a link symbol are the " chain links" connected ( click on them a few times to see the differences ) . Them make sure that the sliders for
1) Master
2) PCM
3) and any other ( you may need to click on edit / Preferences and add some)

[arpruss]

Originally Posted by JohnVV

i take it you have looked for the obvious like.
r-click the sound icon

This is really dumb, but where do I find the sound icon to right click on it?

[JohnVV]

on the upper right of the screen ,in the tool bar by the time and date there is a little teeny tiny speaker .

[arpruss]

I don't have the icon. (The fact that I don't have a standard KDE 4 setup, but I've installed the 3.5 kicker on top of KDE 4 probably explains that. But I think the sound issue is quite independent.) Can I launch this audio config from a shell instead, or edit a config file?

[JohnVV]

the gnome gonfig's control some/most things even in kde .i will post back after i boot into kde 3
also kde4 on fedora 9 is a bit buggy .

[arpruss]

OK, I installed gnome. The settings in the sound config look fine. I tried both linked and unliked controls.

I also played around with speaker-test. Here's the weirdness. As far as I can tell, low frequency tones (e.g. 70hz) played to the left speaker come out through the right speaker. I can't quite tell if they come out from the left--it's hard to hear the directions of low frequence tones, but I think they don't. High frequency tones played to the left speaker come out through the left speaker. Both high and low frequency tones played to the right speaker are simply dropped.

This suggests that something is weirdly cross-wired, with the right speaker being somehow connected by ALSA to the left channel's LFE subchannel.