Hi all,                                                                                                         
                                                                                                                
I'm having a minor problem with an ESS AudioDrive sound card (ESS 1868, 
PnP) under NetBSD/i386 1.5.2.  It basically works fine, except that one of the 
audio output channels appears to be inverted.  I noticed this after playing it 
through a Dolby Pro Logic system: it causes the surround speakers to go kind of 
hyperactive - it sounds as if the surround speakers end up playing the main 
signal, while the main speakers get the surround signal.

I've tested it with both 16- and 8-bit playback, and with madplay and mpg123
and the behaviour is always the same.  In particular, playing back a stereo 
sound in which both channels are identical results in output only from the 
surround speakers.  However, with the card in mono mode it seems to be fine 
(which suggests that it's not something fundamentally wrong with my hardware).

Here's what dmesg has to say about it, anyway:
<<
isapnp0: read port 0x203
isapnp0: <ESS ES1868 Plug and Play AudioD, ESS0000, , > port 0x800/8 not 
configured
ess1 at isapnp0 port 0x220/16,0x388/4,0x330/2 irq 5 drq 1,0
ess1:: ESS Technology ES1868 [version 0x688b]
ess1: audio1 interrupting at irq 5
audio0 at ess1: half duplex, mmap, independent
opl0 at ess1: model OPL3
midi0 at opl0: ESS Yamaha OPL3
joy0 at isapnp0 port 0x201/1  
joy0: ESS ES1868 Plug and Play AudioD
joy0: joystick connected
isapnp0: <ESS ES1868 Plug and Play AudioD, ESS0002, , > port 
0x168/8,0x36e/2 irq 10 not configured
>>
  
So, is this likely to be just an idiosyncrasy of my particular card, or could it be
a driver issue?
-- 
Chris Edwards
mailto:cme@ihug.co.nz