Hello friends! I have recently, in the last month or so, moved from Windows 11 to PopOS and finally landed in the wonderful land that is EndeavourOS. I’m a pretty casual user and very happy with my setup as it fits the generally basic needs I have for a laptop. For some background to my issue a little bit of context:
The laptop I’m using is an XPlus Storm 10 with no modifications to hardware. I use a USB C cable to an Anker Nano Dock which has the connections for my mouse, game controller, provides power, and has an HDMI connector to an overhead projector and surround sound system. I am using KDE and I religiously run the arch update command every day or two.
I have been struggling a little bit with the audio output in this setup. Using a cloud gaming service I can stream the games I’d like to play but the audio is a little touchy. With the HDMI connection plugged in, I can see quite a list of audio output selections but only one ever seems to work through the sound bar (stereo with analog), and it doesn’t utilize the surround sound speakers. I can see options to select 5.1 surround sound or 7.1 surround sound (our system is a 7.1) but whenever I select either of these there is absolutely no sound from any speaker.
The other interesting bit is I have to reboot for the stereo audio to work properly. When the OS loads and I plug into the dock, sound will come through the speakers just fine. If I select anything else in the audio menu and then go back to it, no go. I have to do a full reboot again for it to work. I have tried this reboot trick with 5.1 and 7.1 both with no success.
Does anyone have any ideas as to what I may be doing wrong or if there’s some limitation in my setup preventing the surround sound from working properly?
Well, as your Laptop has USB-C with DP Alt mode, the main issue would be the Anker Nano Dock. Therefore, you really should take into account which of the USB-C ports of the Laptop as well as the Dock actually are rated for the DP Alt mode. And additionally, it might be an cable issue as well. I cant tell if the Dock would carry over the video as well as the audio from the USB-C to the HDMI connection.
Also, one feasible culprit might be that audio is generally routed to the analog audio output, you may want to check in the taskbar widget this :
Right click → enable show virtual devices
In the widget controls, not only select the output device, but also check if “play all audio via this device” is activated, otherwise your audio playback might not be routed correctly
In doubt, check within the applications tab which program is playing back audio and to which device it’s routed.
Alternatively, I guess you already have checked the audio configuration options, where you should have the option to test each source individually.
We have eliminated the dock as a culprit by using a USB C to HDMI direct dongle to remove the dock and cable from the equation and had the exact same results. This setup did work on Windows, though at this point I obviously can’t go back and perfectly validate how that was routing. I’ll give your virtual device suggestion a try.
Thank you for the welcome!!! So happy to be here. I have definitely been stalking around for answers on how to fix minor things after first moving to Endeavour. I replied to @1093i3511 which I think answers your questions here as well. I will add, though, that I was never able to get the external speaker audio to work at all on Pop! but that is just fine because it ultimately led me to taking the leap to give Endeavour a try.
