How to stream 1 source to multiple sinks

by

In picture below, which is sound panel/applet, there are listed all my possible links and HDMI, no idea how that end up there. I’m interested in “Analog Output”. There are 3 output profiles:

  • “stereo output”,
  • “surround sound 4.0”
  • “surround sound 5.1”

My soundcard has aside of other outputs 6 mono outputs, 1-6. So what I’d like to have is following profiles:

  1. analog stereo output, which plays stereo audio to outputs 1 and 2. This one is seleted on screenshot.

  2. I’d like to have same for outputs 3,4 and 5,6. Motivation: I would like to attach headphones, small loudspeakers and bigger loudspeakers and be able to select between them using this profiles. CLI-only alternative works for me as well, I don’t insist on this UI, however it will most surely read the data from some pulseaudio backend.

  3. some combination of these, ie. play same signal to 1,2 and 5,6. Optional extra, I don’t have usecase for that, but I’d like to know how to do that if I need to do so.

Thanks!

screen

Answer

Whilst this could potentially be possible, by routing the internal 6-channel configuration before it hits the sound card, I don’t think there would be sufficient demand for it to be viable as a saleable product.

In short, I doubt anyone has done this because the demand is too small, too user-specific. I’d look for a hardware switching solution & just use stereo.

Overall, I think this is an XY Problem You want switchable outputs, (which is easy on Mac & Win; idk about nix), not reassignable channels, which is hard on any platform (partially because 5.1 decoding is proprietary, which makes consumer-level manipulation hit licensing laws as well as non-standard API calls).
Reassigning channels on a pro audio rig is also easy, it’s just at consumer level it’s tough.

This is all, btw, before you even consider the issue of connecting ‘speakers’ & headphones to the 6-ch RCA jacks on the back of a computer. They’re expecting to be fed to an amplifier… so you’d need two of those, & headphones will be a bad impedance match even if you did make up a DIY dual RCA > TRS jack.

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Martin Mucha , Answer Author : Tetsujin

Leave a Comment