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Hey, friends.
This is my first post here and I am sure I am going to get things wrong. Plz be patient, but I will explain the issue and everything I've tried so far.
So, my bluetooth audio works great. Everything sounds normal and fine. However, if I connect any audio device directly to the computer, either via USB or via 3.5mm, the resulting audio sounds like horribly compressed static. HDMI devices do not work at all (which is fine, I don't want my monitor speakers, but I thought it might be relevant.)
I am dual booting and these same devices work fine in Windows, so I've ruled out hardware.
As BT audio does not use your sound card, this led me to believe this is an issue is specific to how Arch and my sound card are interacting.
I've seen a lot of threads on *missing* audio, but nothing about your speakers doing their best take on eldritch screaming. Still, I've tried following some of the recurring advice I've seen. I've tried using alsamixer and unmuting everything, selectively muting, etc. Muting certain sliders in my onboard sound, noted in alsamixer as "HD-Audio Generic" (Chip: Realtek ALC897), does mute all audio. Thus, I don't believe that the wrong sound device is being set as the default, otherwise why would muting the correct one stop my audio?
So, with BT audio working, I thought for sure that pulse audio / pipewire were fine.
For a while, I focused on my sound devices, drivers, etc., for no particular reason than it was a place to start. I've been through the entirety of this resource and tried the things I understand, which admittedly is far from everything: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Advanc … chitecture
I have:
1. Installed alsa-utils (obviously).
2. Unmuted my channels using amixer (clearly they are not muted, for they are screaming)
3. Muted absolutely everything in alsamixer and enabled only the specific combination of channels required to produce audio
4. Confirmed that running
speaker-test -c 2 reproduces the shrill static sound, so I don't think something like OSS emulation would help.
5a. Tried setting my default sound card using
/usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf, just in case I was wrong about the default sound card
5b. Used asoundconf to set my default sound card, just in case I did 5a wrong.
6. Confirmed with
lsmod | grep '^snd' | column -tand
ls -l /dev/snd that my sound drivers and modules have loaded.
output:
snd_seq_dummy 12288 0
snd_hrtimer 12288 1
snd_seq 131072 10 snd_seq_dummy
snd_hda_codec_realtek 208896 1
snd_hda_codec_generic 114688 1 snd_hda_codec_realtek
snd_hda_codec_hdmi 98304 1
snd_hda_scodec_component 20480 1 snd_hda_codec_realtek
snd_hda_intel 65536 2
snd_usb_audio 544768 2
snd_intel_dspcfg 40960 1 snd_hda_intel
snd_intel_sdw_acpi 16384 1 snd_intel_dspcfg
snd_usbmidi_lib 49152 1 snd_usb_audio
snd_hda_codec 212992 4 snd_hda_codec_generic,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec_realtek
snd_ump 36864 1 snd_usb_audio
snd_rawmidi 57344 2 snd_usbmidi_lib,snd_ump
snd_hda_core 147456 5 snd_hda_codec_generic,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_codec_realtek
snd_seq_device 16384 3 snd_seq,snd_ump,snd_rawmidi
snd_hwdep 20480 2 snd_usb_audio,snd_hda_codec
snd_pcm 200704 5 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_usb_audio,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_core
snd_timer 53248 3 snd_seq,snd_hrtimer,snd_pcm
snd 155648 25 snd_hda_codec_generic,snd_seq,snd_seq_device,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hwdep,snd_hda_intel,snd_usb_audio,snd_usbmidi_lib,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_timer,snd_ump,snd_pcm,snd_rawmiditotal 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 80 Nov 1 23:16 by-id
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 160 Nov 1 23:16 by-path
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 12 Nov 1 23:16 controlC0
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 17 Nov 1 23:16 controlC1
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 4 Nov 1 23:16 controlC2
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 19 Nov 1 23:16 controlC3
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 11 Nov 1 23:16 hwC0D0
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 16 Nov 1 23:16 hwC1D0
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 9 Nov 1 23:16 pcmC0D10p
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 10 Nov 1 23:16 pcmC0D11p
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 5 Nov 1 23:17 pcmC0D3p
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 6 Nov 1 23:16 pcmC0D7p
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 7 Nov 1 23:16 pcmC0D8p
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 8 Nov 1 23:16 pcmC0D9p
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 14 Nov 1 23:17 pcmC1D0c
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 13 Nov 1 23:42 pcmC1D0p
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 15 Nov 1 23:16 pcmC1D2c
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 3 Nov 1 23:17 pcmC2D0c
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 2 Nov 1 23:16 pcmC2D0p
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 18 Nov 1 23:17 pcmC3D0c
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 1 Nov 1 23:16 seq
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 33 Nov 1 23:16 timerHowever, a friend helped me test bypassing pipewire and going straight to ALSA with some audio. I turned all profiles to 'off' in pavucontrol and ran
speaker-test -D plughw:1,0 -t sine(not 0/0 as my sound card is device 2) and lo-and-behold, the chime came through crisp and clear.
So, I think something in pipewire is maybe a distortion factory.
I can unplug my microphone and mute everything in alsamixer except the required audio channels and I still get this (unless I'm using BT audio), so it's not a feedback loop in the conventional sense where microphone gain is feeding into speakers, repeat ad nauseam.
I'm not sure what I did to pipewire to upset it so, but at this point I've got no idea how to proceed (nor did my friend, though he's mulling it over).
I read through all of this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire
But none of that seems to describe my issue or how to solve it.
Super open to ideas.
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Just wanted to leave a note about this in case anyone in the future runs into this post via Google.
This was solved. A friend helped me continue to narrow down the issue. I created a new user to check if sound worked normally on the new user. It did. This confirmed it was a config issue on the user level.
In my particular case, I was able to rename /home/[usr]/.config/pipewire, reboot, and my problem was gone. Nothing in that folder was crucial to pipewire functioning and something in it was causing a feedback loop.
I'll update when I find the time to run through the config files one by one and figure out where exactly the problem was, but as a shotgun solution, it certainly worked.
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Since BT audio is working fine, you're probably right that it's a specific issue with how Arch is handling your sound card.
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