[continued from previous message]   
      
   > But when splitting loads between two sound cards, that's just not a simple   
   ALSA   
   > mod, that's going to take something more. And at a guess, that would be Jack   
   > to do the routing (rather than write something nasty at the ALSA level).   
   > Even if there was a ticky box when in 2.0 mode to drive   
   > two outputs, they would be outputs coming off the same HDAudio chip.   
   > (Two sets of 32 ohm headphones carrying the same music content.)   
   >   
   > And if someone felt they didn't have the hardware for this, the NVidia card   
   > audio-over-HDMI is a separate audio device from the HDAudio sound chip,   
   > so if you needed test materials for a Jack experiment, you could send a   
   > sound channel to the speakers in your monitor. Not everyone uses the speakers   
   > in their monitor, and they may not know they exist.   
      
   My video card also sends HDMI audio to the monitor but since I use my   
   desktop for music the monitor speakers are useless. I don't even use the   
   HDMI ports, only the DisplayPort ones. All I need is front stereo and a   
   wide spectrum (mostly a speaker limit). Monitor speakers might be ok for   
   speech on youtube or narrow-spectrum music but that's about all. I am   
   very impressed though by the quality of my onboard HD-Audio which, with   
   less than 10% of the hardware on a sound card, delivers just about the   
   same (except for 1/4" jacks on some older Xonar models).   
      
   What I would like the industry to come up with is a MUCH better 1/8"   
   jack design. When you sweat a gallon of struggle and strife recording a   
   10-minute piece (and you know you may never in your life be able to do   
   as well again, all depending) it's no fun to have to recommence because   
   of one freakin' intermittent contact break! Every time the topic hits my   
   mind I see those female battery terminal cleaner brushes with hundreds   
   of stiff steel whiskers. Someting like that, maybe with less than   
   hundreds, but a rig that makes it impossible for less than three to be   
   always in solid contact unless YOU want to pull it.   
      
      
      
      
   > I even have a stereo output jack on my HDMI to VGA adapter, but that   
   > only counts as a monitor-style audio output. The "destination" in that   
   > case is still NVidia, as nobody knows the chip there is a "sink" for sound.   
   > There is no back channel from the chip saying it is doing that.   
   >   
   > So you don't need to have a Xonar, to do these experiments. Look carefully   
   > at your collection of goods, for odds and ends like that.   
   >   
   > And Bluetooth audio does not count in this case, as we want something   
   > akin to conventional streaming, to see if a Jack scheme might work.   
   > Bluetooth might involve more aggravation to get running as a sink.   
   >   
   > It took a long time, for Linux to get the "stereo, 5.1, 7.1" and so on   
   choices,   
   > of a default system mixer model. Back before Pulseaudio and Pipewire,   
   > people were doing custom things with ALSA config files, but this is   
   > not for the faint of heart. In my experiments, I was busting things   
   > more often than I was fixing them :-)   
   >   
   >     Paul   
      
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