Very low volume

General system Gaming, sound and video
21

I can confirm, on my laptop running EOS, the audio does sound like it has a lot less volume. As others mentioned, you can go above 100% volume, which is what I do sometimes and it seems to work fine as well.

But on a workstations, where I also run EOS, using external speakers, the sound works a lot better, but still, not as loud as Windows.

22

ALC3866-CG

Yeah thatā€™s what i figured too, not codec but chip i presume thoughā€¦Interesting that i was unable to find anything on even Realtekā€™s own site about it, nor in alsa so farā€¦

Can you play some test file with whatever you play it with and then aplay like that:

aplay something.mp3

To see if there is a difference

Also, letā€™s see:

aplay -l
23

With aplay I can only play wav-Files. Doing so yields the same (low) volume as when I play the file with e.g., Parole Media Player, so no noticeable difference.

$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC1220 Analog [ALC1220 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [U28E570]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
1 Like
24

Sorry, iā€™m not sure how to help you debug further (iā€™m low on time for real depth this days).
Hopefully someone else will come to helpā€¦

One thing you may try is to try route audio through jack, to see if it outputs normal levels.

1 Like
25

Thank you anyway for your time and effort.
I will try your suggestion concerning jack.

Best regards!

26

I donā€™t know if any of this is useful:

Could the problem be with the xfce4-mixer?

https://docs.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-mixer/start

The problem seems to not be with alsa.

I know this seems crazy but:

Are you sure the speakers are connected correctly to the light green output from the back of the PC to the speakers?

I canā€™t tell you how many times i have seen lack of sound is caused by incorrect connections!

Have you got the latest BIOS for your motherboard?

27

Hi.
Thanks, for your answer.

I dont think the problem is the xfce mixer. I dont even have it, I use the pulse audio mixer via the panel (or is this the same?). But more importantly, I tried an Ubuntu live medium with Gnome and faced the same problem.

Yes, the speakers are also firmly connected, when I boot into Windows, the sound is perfectly fine.

I also have the latest Firmware updates.

Cheers!

28

Apologies for essential necroā€™ing a thread from half a year ago. I had this same problem with ALC chipsets, and I found, for some bizarre, setting my master channel to 100 fixed it, - BUT it also took shifting my audio output to the front headphone socket on my build, instead of the rear lineout, which for some reason was defaulting to surround sound.

Iā€™ll do some further testing to see if I can mimic the behaviour on the rear line out, but as it is, my headphones are absolutely blasting now.

29

I guess you do not make any configuration for pipewire.
Please check my reply posts here, this is the most complete configs in the net.