Arch Linux

Crimbas

Member

Registered: 2025-09-01

Posts: 1

Audio works with LTS kernel but not with the latest one

Hi there, I am relatively new to Arch Linux and I am experiencing an audio issue with my laptop Dell XPS 16 9640.
If I boot the system with LTS kernel, I can set the HiFi profile from pavucontrol and the audio card just works fine, I can hear the audio from the speakers, from the headphones and my microphone gets voice input. The problem is when I boot the system with the latest kernel (6.16.4 at the time of writing but I had the same problem with older minor versions), I can only set the ProAudio profile from pavucontrol but my headphones are not recognized while built-in speakers and microphone work.

I use PipeWire and PulseAudio packages and also, according to the wiki, I have installed linux-firmware-cirrus and sof-firmware.

$ sudo pacman -Q | grep -E 'pipewire|pulse|linux-firmware-cirrus|sof-firmware'
kpipewire 6.4.4-1
libpipewire 1:1.4.7-1
libpulse 17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1
linux-firmware-cirrus 20250808-1
pipewire 1:1.4.7-1
pipewire-alsa 1:1.4.7-1
pipewire-audio 1:1.4.7-1
pipewire-libcamera 1:1.4.7-1
pipewire-pulse 1:1.4.7-1
pipewire-session-manager 1:1.4.7-1
pulse-native-provider 1:1.4.7-1
pulseaudio-qt 1.7.0-1
qemu-audio-pipewire 10.0.3-1
sof-firmware 2025.05.1-1

These are the audio cards recognized by Arch, one is my USB external webcam, so can be ignored.

$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [sofsoundwire   ]: sof-soundwire - sof-soundwire
                      DellInc.-XPS169640--029TJ2
 1 [C920           ]: USB-Audio - HD Pro Webcam C920
                      HD Pro Webcam C920 at usb-0000:00:14.0-4.4.1, high speed

$ lspci | grep -E 'Audio|Multimedia' 
00:05.0 Multimedia controller: Intel Corporation Meteor Lake IPU (rev 04)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Meteor Lake-P HD Audio Controller (rev 20)

Kernel version:

$ uname -a
Linux acheron 6.16.4-arch1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu, 28 Aug 2025 19:49:53 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I hope I will solve the issue with your help. Thank you in advance!

ankabo

Member

Registered: 2025-07-14

Posts: 16

Re: Audio works with LTS kernel but not with the latest one

Hi,
what is the output of:

alsactl init

any error?

Or try

journalctl -b | grep -iE 'alsa|sof|soundwire|ucm'

Its possible, that UCM2 configs are not matching with the current kernel.

For a try you can install the newest version from AUR,

alsa-ucm-conf-git

and

sof-bin

You can check your ucm profiles and it will look like this, check for Hifi.conf

andre@archlinux ~> ls /usr/share/alsa/ucm2/sof-soundwire
cs35l56-bridge.conf  cs42l43.conf       cs42l43-spk.conf  Hdmi.conf  rt1308.conf  rt1318.conf  rt5682.conf  rt711.conf       rt712.conf       rt713-dmic.conf  rt715.conf       rt722.conf
cs35l56.conf         cs42l43-dmic.conf  dmic.conf         HiFi.conf  rt1316.conf  rt1320.conf  rt700.conf   rt711-sdca.conf  rt712-dmic.conf  rt713-sdca.conf  rt715-sdca.conf  sof-soundwire.conf

Ohmygodzilla

Member

Registered: 2025-05-25

Posts: 2

Re: Audio works with LTS kernel but not with the latest one

Hi,

I had similar issue. Solved it by removing cache for pipewire and wireplumber. Paths in my setup

~/.cache/pipewire

&

~/.local/share/wireplumber/

Last edited by Ohmygodzilla (2025-09-04 09:29:53)