Arch Linux

Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,338

Front headphone socket

This is weird, and now I think it's a S/W issue.

I can plug my headphones in to the front jack (1/8) and they are fine. These are expensive headphones (Sennheiser).

I can also plug my amplifier into the same jack, and many time I will only get right audio. I figured it was cheap cables making a bad connection, and this seemed to be borne out by putting unnecessary pressure on the jack. I changed the cable for another fairly inexpensive one, with the same result. I swapped again for a much more premium cable, and it worked fine, for a couple of hours, and then dropped back to right channel only again.

And so I've definitely ruled out the cable, and I know the amp is working just fine.

And then, I upped the volume in the audio mixer on my system, and both channels came back.

Is this a known issue, and is there a fix?

Pipewire (now) but Pulse used to do the same.

I should add, this is only the front audio output. The rear audio outputs through my PC speakers have no problems at all. It's as though the front output just drops the left channel below a certain volume. AC97 audio out.

Last edited by Roken (2026-02-10 21:50:34)

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus B550-F Gaming MB, 128Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (2 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

/ is the root of all problems.

Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,338

Re: Front headphone socket

Oh, OK, on further inspection, HDMI audio was also enabled, despite there being no HDMI audio devices attached. Could it have been getting confused? I've never been able to diagnose Linux sound issues (after more than 20 years, audio is just a mystery to me).

Last edited by Roken (2026-02-10 21:55:03)

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus B550-F Gaming MB, 128Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (2 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

/ is the root of all problems.

dimich

Member

From: Kharkiv, Ukraine

Registered: 2009-11-03

Posts: 488

Re: Front headphone socket

$ pactl list cards

Also

$ pactl list sinks

for both cases: when "only get right audio" and "both channels came back".

I upped the volume in the audio mixer on my system, and both channels came back.

With what mixer application?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,059

Re: Front headphone socket

There are some sound cards that kill off the audio despite not being entirely muted from a UI perspective, either because the driver doesn't report it's DB curves correctly, the firmware is implemented weirdly (UEFI updates might help in cases like these) or the aggregation of volumes that pipewire/pulse tend to do adjust a "logical set of mixers" that leads to some correlation with the previous mentioned concepts.

Post the outputs mentioned above, as well as

amixer -c0 #Replace 0 with other index from aplay -l if it happens to not be 0

The easiest to avoid weirdness here without having to sacrifice the ability to control the volume one way or another is enforcing a software volume via wireplumber: https://pipewire.pages.freedesktop.org/ … ft%2Dmixer

Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,338

Re: Front headphone socket

Sorry for the holdup - work got in the way.

Oddly, I can't reproduce, now. I'll have to wait until it happens again. Sorry.

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus B550-F Gaming MB, 128Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (2 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

/ is the root of all problems.