Arch Linux

PrometheusAlexander

Member

Registered: 2025-08-20

Posts: 15

Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

Hello for everyone.
I'm having a peculiar audio problem when I can't hear anything until I change the sub-output from either Kmix or Pavucontrol.
The output is silent on any of my output devices until I for instance change my Headphones to Line out and back.
Or my HDMI to any other subdevice and then back to the default one.
This happens on every device. Started happening on about 1 month ago. If I watch a movie and put it on pause, the problem appears again and I have to do the "fix" again to hear anything. It's really starting to grind my gears.

Here's my journalctl -b:

Please ignore the 15-30 year old warez.

https://0x0.st/Kzqi.txt

and here's my dmesg.

https://0x0.st/Kzq8.txt

Running smoothly otherwise. Some keyring errors but I can fix them myself probably.

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-Prometheus

PrometheusAlexander

Member

Registered: 2025-08-20

Posts: 15

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

Worth mentioning that I'm changing my Storage HDD; hence the Warez are visible. Wish the read speed would be as fast as the write speed on the new one. Also using KDE Plasma. Got a little excited and installed some maybe useless packages in the heat of the moment. Still the problem is a really nasty one since when I change for instance Stereo Output on headphones I can't hear a thing, but Full Duplex I can hear everything. Same with the frontal and backpanel ports. When I change to something they clearly don't support, no sound as expected, but when I change back to what it was, the sound magically appears.

Last edited by PrometheusAlexander (2025-08-20 17:32:18)

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-Prometheus

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,147

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

Aug 20 17:26:28 ALPHATAURI wireplumber[2404]: wp-event-dispatcher: <WpAsyncEventHook:0x558fa544a400> failed: failed to activate item: Object activation aborted: proxy destroyed
Aug 20 17:26:28 ALPHATAURI wireplumber[2404]: wp-event-dispatcher: <WpAsyncEventHook:0x558fa543b610> failed: <WpSiStandardLink:0x558fa5788f10> link failed: 1 of 1 PipeWire links failed to activate
...
Aug 20 17:28:08 ALPHATAURI pulseaudio[2609]: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended.

You're running pulseaudio and pipewire/wireplumber concurrently which will make them trip and fall over each other.

Install pipewire-pulse and say yes to any replacement questions, reboot, try to reproduce.

PrometheusAlexander

Member

Registered: 2025-08-20

Posts: 15

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
:: pipewire-pulse-1:1.4.7-1 and pulseaudio-17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1 are in conflict. Remove pulseaudio? [y/N] y
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio=17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1' required by pulseaudio-bluetooth
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio=17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1' required by pulseaudio-equalizer
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio' required by pulseaudio-equalizer-ladspa
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio=17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1' required by pulseaudio-jack
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio=17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1' required by pulseaudio-lirc
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio=17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1' required by pulseaudio-rtp
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio=17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1' required by pulseaudio-zeroconf

Yeah I'm getting a lot of dependency failures.

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-Prometheus

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,147

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

Get rid of all of them

pacman -Rns pulseaudio{,-bluetooth,-equalizer-ladspa,-jack,-lirc,-rtp,-zeroconf}

PrometheusAlexander

Member

Registered: 2025-08-20

Posts: 15

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

Thank you. Trying this now with caution.

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-Prometheus

PrometheusAlexander

Member

Registered: 2025-08-20

Posts: 15

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

⭰─ꗟ─bash:0:0 ⦖ ࿐  ⦕ shs ⯻ ⯗ ⯻ ALPHATAURI ⯻ ~ ꚼ sudo pacman -Rns pulseaudio{,-bluetooth,-equalizer,-equalizer-ladspa,-jack,-lirc,-rtp,-zeroconf}
checking dependencies...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulse-native-provider' required by gnome-settings-daemon
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulse-native-provider' required by paprefs
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulse-native-provider' required by pavucontrol-qt
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulse-native-provider' required by plasma-pa
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulse-native-provider' required by pulsemixer

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-Prometheus

PrometheusAlexander

Member

Registered: 2025-08-20

Posts: 15

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

So gonna get rid of pulse-native-provider, which in turn needs to get rid of gnome-settings-daemon, paprefs, pavucontrol-qt, plasma-pa and pulsemixer... I'm smelling something fishy.. glad I just installed 4TB of fresh M.2 meat so I can finally make a proper snapshot BTRFS layout.. I'm just thoroughly against reinstalling arch and wouldn't have done it without the EXT4 resize corruption disaster.. my mentality is it that if you can't fix it, it doesn't deserve to be running at least by you (me)

Last edited by PrometheusAlexander (2025-08-20 18:59:07)

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-Prometheus

PrometheusAlexander

Member

Registered: 2025-08-20

Posts: 15

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

Well here goes nothing... or everything.

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-Prometheus

PrometheusAlexander

Member

Registered: 2025-08-20

Posts: 15

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

okay removed all of them and now I'm really afraid to init 6... excuse me.. reboot

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-Prometheus

PrometheusAlexander

Member

Registered: 2025-08-20

Posts: 15

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

Kernel log looks interesting at the time I removed everything:

https://imgur.com/carbon-0K3vHf5

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-Prometheus

PrometheusAlexander

Member

Registered: 2025-08-20

Posts: 15

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

Too bad I'm just in the middle of transferring files from an ancient drive to a new one so can't really verify if I broke the whole system.. oh well.. It was time to reinstall anyways..

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-Prometheus

tekstryder

Member

Registered: 2013-02-14

Posts: 514

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

This is not a blog. Please stop multi-posting.

PrometheusAlexander

Member

Registered: 2025-08-20

Posts: 15

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

I will heed this warning.

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-Prometheus

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,147

Re: Audio problem on 6.16.0-zen2-1-zen

Hrml in that case just doing

pacman -Rdd pulseaudio{-bluetooth,-equalizer-ladspa,-jack,-lirc,-rtp,-zeroconf}
pacman -Syu pipewire-pulse

would've probably been the simplest option.

In any case, since your screenshot has no relation to the audio problem, is the audio problem fixed with pipewire-pulse installed?

Last edited by V1del (2025-08-20 22:08:51)