4.0 surround treated as 2 stereo pairs with engine

[professionalmoment]

Hello!
I am programing an server of sorts which can play a sound at a position on a 2D plane based on requests.
The setup is a virtual 4 channel device with the monitor of it put into two stereo devices as seen here in qpwgraph

The issue I have run into is when a sound is played with a position it comes out of both the intended speaker and it's stereo equivalent on the other physical device at equal volumes.
For example say at (-1, -1) instead of coming mostly out of the front left it comes out of the front and rear left at equal volume.

My code is here (please excuse my poor C).
I have tried initializing the device separate to the engine setting several settings (you will notice some failed attempts commented out) which results in a beepy crackly kind of a noise (still with the same positioning issue described above) when a sound is played but no errors.

I am running pipewire 0.3.64-1 with wireplumber 0.4.13-1 and pipewire-pulse for pulse audio but I have been able to replicate this issue consistently on several different Linux systems and VMs with different versions.

Any guidance you can share would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your time.

[mackron]

Looking at your screenshot, it looks like you've got two pairs of speakers both configured as FL and FR. I'm suspecting that could be the issue. Could you put #define MA_DEBUG_OUTPUT above you #include "miniaudio" and then post the output? I'll bet it reports two FRONT_LEFT and two FRONT_RIGHT channels. If that's the case, that'll be the issue.

To address that, you would need to update your system settings so that the back speakers are set up as back-left/right instead of front-left/right.

[professionalmoment]

Thank you so much! I had channel_map wrong in the pactl command to create the virtual device.

For anyone having a similar issue (though I doubt this will crop up) the correct usage is channel_map=front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right not FL,FR etc