Plasma Sound "test" buttons are the only source of audio playback

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

Hello, all :slight_smile:

I recently installed EOS for the first time on my desktop. Everything seems good except I have no audio… or so I thought until I started poking settings to try to toggle it on. So I will revise that to say I have no useful audio.

I have old but previously working (on Arch most recently) 5.1 speakers. I’m running Plasma, and here are all the sound indicators I can see and what they do:

  • Audio icon in toolbar:
    • Present, shows in unmuted state
    • Clicking it opens the settings quickview, devices shown all at 100% volume:
      • Out: Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller Pro
      • In1: Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller Pro (selected)
      • In2: Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller Pro 2
    • Clicking the volume level slider does not make a little ping noise like I would expect
  • Clicking Configure Audio Devices on that window opens Sound—System Settings:
    • Here, I see the same three devices as in the quickview panel, all are set to Pro Audio and the only other option is Off.
    • Additionally, I see “GA104 High Definition Audio Controller” under Inactive Cards. It has several options: Off [selected], Pro Audio, Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output, Digital Surround (HDMI) 5.1 Output, Digital Surround (HDMI) 7.1 Output.
    • Here is where things get weird, and where I have hit a wall with searching to resolve this myself:
      1. Click Test for the Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller Pro playback device.
      2. Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller Pro test panel opens with buttons for aux0-aux7 (so, 7.1 I presume).
      3. Clicking aux0 and aux1 don’t do anything (makes sense, I have 5.1), but aux2-aux7 dutifully play the little sound test noise on each respective speaker.
      4. This is the only way I have been able to get any sound out of this machine.

I am really perplexed by this issue. If it made no sound ever under any circumstance at least I would probably know there was something completely broken, but getting sound from only the test buttons I really don’t know what to think! I have tried booting from an EOS and a Kubuntu live USB and get the same behavior.

My experience level: I’m a daily/exclusive Linux user of ~5 years and am comfortable with some level of debugging my own issues, but I don’t know the deep-level stuff for troubleshooting things like this. Any advice/pointers to some existing post I am failing to find would be greatly appreciated.

2

what does wpctl status return?

It should give you a bunch of devices, sinks and sources.

If it does, try cycling through the sinks and testing audio on each one, one at a time.

this is done with wpctl set-default followed by the associated numerical id which status should show you next to each sink.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply :slight_smile:

Running wpctl status while Firefox attempts to play sound, I get:

PipeWire 'pipewire-0' [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, cookie:1887631663]
 └─ Clients:
        32. kwin_wayland                        [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:848]
        33. WirePlumber                         [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:915]
        41. WirePlumber [export]                [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:915]
        73. pipewire                            [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:1006]
        74. libcanberra                         [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:985]
        75.                                     [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:985]
        76. xdg-desktop-portal                  [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:856]
        77. plasmashell                         [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:1007]
        78. libcanberra                         [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:1007]
        79.                                     [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:1007]
        85. Firefox                             [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:1474]
        99. wpctl                               [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:8812]
       101. System Settings                     [1.2.7, my-user@my-pc, pid:6679]

Audio
 ├─ Devices:
 │      42. GA104 High Definition Audio Controller [alsa]
 │      43. Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller [alsa]
 │
 ├─ Sinks:
 │  *   50. Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller Pro [vol: 1.00]
 │
 ├─ Sources:
 │  *   51. Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller Pro [vol: 1.00]
 │      52. Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller Pro 2 [vol: 1.00]
 │
 ├─ Filters:
 │
 └─ Streams:
        98. Firefox
             96. output_FL       > ALC892 Analog:playback_AUX0  [active]
             97. output_FR       > ALC892 Analog:playback_AUX1  [active]

Video
 ├─ Devices:
 │
 ├─ Sinks:
 │
 ├─ Sources:
 │
 ├─ Filters:
 │
 └─ Streams:

Settings
 └─ Default Configured Devices:
         0. Audio/Sink    alsa_output.pci-0000_26_00.1.pro-output-3

So, IIUC, only seeing one sink with nothing to cycle through.

I don’t really know what I’m looking at here, but to me it seems odd that Firefox is attempting to stream to output_FL AUX0 and output_FR AUX1 (front left and front right?). It should be playing on either 5.1 (what I have) or 7.1 (what I think I am seeing in the Test view as aux0-aux7), I think?

4

Ok, I?ve had more time to think about it, your issue reminds me of my issues with multi-channel audio on alsa like a decade ago in my early (earliest really) days of using linux. Basically getting no sound except when running an audio test.

What I believe could be happening is that the audio test is a multi-channel track that fires off on all available channels, while the firefox audio is just stereo and it could be firing off on any of your channels, so for instance maybe it’s going off in the subwoofer and is therefore poorly audible.

There’s a few things worth trying in no particular order.

Try opening alsamixer (in a terminal) and messing with the settings in there, remember to press f6 to select an audio device. In there you can mute and adjust volume for specific channels, it could be that whichever channel you need is just muted or set to 0 volume.

I found this when searching for multi-channel pipewire guides:

Might be worth reading through.

This here

Settings
 └─ Default Configured Devices:
         0. Audio/Sink    alsa_output.pci-0000_26_00.1.pro-output-3

I believe could be a hint, that’s the alsa identifier for the default output device and it say output 3 implying there might be 2 others, I’m not entirely sure how to change these (I would’ve figured alternatives would be listed under sinks)

But you could try disabling pipewire and seeing how your audio behaves on alsa alone.

Could also try swapping pipewire out for pulseaudio, but I really do not recommend that as a long term solution even if it works because pulseaudio is bad. But it’s acceptable if you are happy with the results, the biggest issue from an end user perspective would be the high latency.

1 Like
5

Alright! So the one thing you were too kind to ask turned out to be the issue: I had the danged cables plugged into the wrong ports :person_facepalming: I had the front cable plugged into the port for the extra 7.1 speakers, and the other pair swapped. Firefox failing to make sound in stereo + getting no output when testing aux0 and aux1, but then getting output on the other channels totally makes sense in that case.

However, your replies telling me where to see these details finally helped me figure it out, so it wasn’t for nothing in the end :sweat_smile:

I am trying to feel a little less silly because (having now wired everything correctly) I see that the color coding on the ports is completely different than the color coding on my speaker wires. I guess in the time since I got these speakers, they have moved to a different color scheme, and I never would have thought of that possibility!

Thank you again for your patient help with this; I feel like I have bit of a better understanding of the stuff under the hood now and I really appreciate that :slight_smile:

6

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