Ubuntu On Sony Vaio FW Series

If you have movies with 5.1 or 4 channels, e.g. DVD, Blue-Ray etc. You can listen all this channels in you headphones! Without any expensive sound system.

Our Realtek chip which is installed in FW series have Virtual Surround technology based on HRTF.

Windows drivers have a switch to enable it in settings. But for Ubuntu it’s a little bit different. Ubuntu have ALSA audio system/drivers and have special plugin for HRTF which is not installed by default. You need to install alsa plugins package libasound2-plugins. Then open/create a file in your home directory named .asoundrc and type this text inside:

pcm.!surround51 {
        type vdownmix
        slave.pcm default
}

pcm.!surround40 {
        type vdownmix
        slave.pcm default
}

Now if player using all channels, vdownmix plugin downmix all channels into 2.

Here is how to enable all channels in SMPlayer (based on MPlayer). Goto Option->Preferences, on the left select General, select Audio tab and change there Channels by default to 6.

P.S. You can test surround with this command in terminal:

speaker-test -Dsurround51 -c6 -l1 -twav

This will make sound for each channel.

UPD: If you have some problems about can not open device etc, try this:

sudo alsa force-reload

I’m working on sound now. We have Realtek ALC262 sound chip in our laptop.

Headphones works with front speakers together, if you select headphones in mixer on switches tab. To enable headphones only, you should mute Front channel in mixer. (on my older vaio laptop front speakers are muted when i plug in headphones automatically)

I still not able to make builtin microphone work..

UPD: Microphone plugged in front jack is working ok.

UPD2: Add options snd-hda-intel model=hippo into /etc/modprobe.d/options to enable headphones jack detection, thanks to Sean Carlos.