Arch Linux

Noki

Member

Registered: 2018-06-08

Posts: 100

[SOLVED] Audio Issues, surround sound through HDMI proving troublesome

Hi All,

I'm in the process on upgrading my desktop to use Arch Linux (Ubuntu newb for the past few years) and successfully got it working now on my Dell XPS 15 this week. So decided it was time to rebuild my main machine. I am dual booting with Ubuntu 18.04 for now since everything on that works and can use it as a guide.

TLDR - Audio sort of works but not really, only stereo works despite selecting 5.1. Some Apps have no audio output at all.

In both Ubuntu and Arch (Plasma) I see 2 Audio devices:

GK104 HDMI blah
Built-in Audio Digital Stereo (IEC958) (I've also tried turning this off in the GUI, it no longer shows in the list)

I want to use HDMI in 5.1 Surround. I have selected this in KDE but I am only getting stereo output. Even then certain applications don't work. For example Rocket League through Steam has no audio at all. However YouTube videos in Chromium work as does Kodi (but only in stereo).

Rebooting to Ubuntu this works out of the box, I simply made the selection in Unity (or whatever it is now) and bam 5.1 audio.

Both ALSA and Pulse seem to be installed correctly, when I run "speaker-test -c 6" and get no audio output from my speakers at all and it shows only 2 speakers being used:

speaker-test 1.1.6

Playback device is default
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 6 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
Rate set to 48000Hz (requested 48000Hz)
Buffer size range from 2048 to 16384
Period size range from 1024 to 1024
Using max buffer size 16384
Periods = 4
was set period_size = 1024
was set buffer_size = 16384
 0 - Front Left
 1 - Front Right
 2 - Unused
 3 - Unused
 4 - Unused
 5 - Unused
Time per period = 17.583526

How can I debug this?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pu … leshooting issues here don't seem to apply to me, I can't see anything related to my issue specifically though I am still reading through it in detail (it's a long page)

Extra Info:
My NVIDIA 770 runs through a Denon AVR-X540BT Amplifier before then connecting to my TV. The TV is the secondary screen (though this shouldn't really matter) and my main display uses DVI-D to connect to my BenQ monitor.

This is the output of "journalctl -xw"
This is the output of "dmesg"

**edit** added TLDR at the top.

Last edited by Noki (2018-06-17 11:51:09)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Audio Issues, surround sound through HDMI proving troublesome

KDE (phonon) settings only apply to KDE applications, for more globally relevant config use e.g. pavucontrol (or plasma-pa's menu) For non working audio support in e.g. Rocket League, make sure you have pulseaudio-alsa, lib32-libpulse and alsa-plugins and lib32-alsa-plugins installed.

FWIW post the following during a playback attempt

sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
aplay -lL
pacmd list-cards
pacmd list-sinks
pacmd list-sink-inputs

Noki

Member

Registered: 2018-06-08

Posts: 100

Re: [SOLVED] Audio Issues, surround sound through HDMI proving troublesome

I tip my cap to you V1del. Those components were missing. Adding them fixed my issue entirely.

"sudo pacman -S pulseaudio-alsa lib32-libpulse alsa-plugins lib32-alsa-plugins" added to my install script/list!

Note to self: "alsa-plugins lib32-alsa-plugins" were already installed so may not need to specifically install these.

Last edited by Noki (2018-06-17 11:53:52)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Audio Issues, surround sound through HDMI proving troublesome

That should technically have not yet fixed 5.1 playback, but I assume you did figure that out as well

Noki

Member

Registered: 2018-06-08

Posts: 100

Re: [SOLVED] Audio Issues, surround sound through HDMI proving troublesome

Odd, all I did was install those apps and run the speaker test again. This time I got full output:

speaker-test 1.1.6

Playback device is default
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 6 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
Rate set to 48000Hz (requested 48000Hz)
Buffer size range from 32 to 349525
Period size range from 10 to 116509
Using max buffer size 349524
Periods = 4
was set period_size = 87381
was set buffer_size = 349524
 0 - Front Left
 4 - Center
 1 - Front Right
 3 - Rear Right
 2 - Rear Left
 5 - LFE

I checked in PulseAudio Volume Control app as you said BEFORE I installed those items and everything was set correctly in there already.

And I can hear static from each speaker during the test. I assume I have it configured correctly and was just missing those components?

Last edited by Noki (2018-06-17 12:04:33)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Audio Issues, surround sound through HDMI proving troublesome

Then the relevant part here is that the default 'default' device directly accesses a stereo hw:0 card over ALSA, installing pulseaudio-alsa creates a /etc/asound.conf which redirects that back to pulse, so yeah if you verified the correct setup in pavucontrol that should carry over afterwards. It just initially sounded like the pavucontrol setup was incorrect as well, since chromium and kodi both have a pulse backend that they will use directly if it is present.

Noki

Member

Registered: 2018-06-08

Posts: 100

Re: [SOLVED] Audio Issues, surround sound through HDMI proving troublesome

I'm learnding!

Thanks that's useful to know. Appreciate you're help on this and others issues

I have a few more pretty minor issues to work though. Hopefully I won't need help on those though.