The VideoLAN Forums

Me and my brother have both experienced this and are wondering if there is a way to change it, or if anyone knows why it happens.

When playing music on Youtube it plays the bass through the subwoofers in my headphones.
Save the video to desktop and try to play it in VLC, no more bass. All the same audio is there, but it's only playing through the front stereo speakers
instead of using all available speakers.
To test if this was just the Youtube player or something Flash does I loaded the video file into JW Player and tried it there. Bass was back in the subwoofers.

So it looks like Flash uses all available speakers to play audio even if the track only has stereo channels.
What we're wondering is: is there a way to get VLC to do the same? Maybe force 5.1 mode even for stereo tracks? We tried using the equalizer to boost
the lower frequencies, but it doesn't really have the same effect as just playing through a bigger speaker.

For anyone else who wants to try this, here's an example (this will probably only work if you have some kind of subwoofer):
Play this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9GoAuDDpjo
Save the video using your script of choice.
Listen to the file in VLC.
Notice the missing bass.

AFAIK VLC can not upmix channels, yet.
There have been requests for a channels matrix already, so who knows, maybe one of these days... Fingers crossed

I'm hoping so. There's a DSP Manager plugin for foobar, so I'm covered on the music front, but it'd be nice to watch videos with some oomph.

I really hope they add this speaker so it channel matrix's it like Youtube does (plays stereo through all speakers). The surround effect is really nice.