[GTALUG] Acer Aspire 3 A315-21 laptop has mono sound only?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 10:42:29PM +0700, Ken Heard via talk wrote:
> Thanks everyone for the suggestions.  The laptop definitely is stereo.
> Earlier this evening (Thursday) I disconnected the fibre optic cable between
> the monitor and the amplifier.  I then plugged in a pair of cheap earphones
> into the monitor and played some music. Only one ear received any sound.
> 
> It looks as though the HDMI cable is the culprit.  The next step is to
> connect another HDMI cable between the laptop and the monitor. That I will
> do tomorrow morning (Friday).

My understanding of HDMI is that the audio is a digital signal embedded
in the data stream, so a broken cable would result in no signal at all
or a complete signal.  The only way I can imagine getting a mono signal
on HDMI is if the audio chip is incorrectly generating the digital signal
mix going into the HDMI link.  Or as suggested the receiving device is
doing something wrong.

-- 
Len Sorensen