I’ve just installed Manjaro on my new Acer Swift Go 16, and was positively surprised that mostly everything seems to just work out of the box, even the hdmi stereo sound output was plug & play, even auto-switching the sound output.
Though now I’d like to output surround sound via that HDMI connection, but it only shows me 2 audio profiles for all output & input(?) devices:
“Play HiFi quality music”
“Off”
What I consider very strange, is that if I change that profile from the sensible default value (“Play HiFi quality music”) to “Off” on any of my audio devices to “Off”, it is synchronized to all other devices.
I’ve found this related seeming thread:
But this hdajackretask shows me a ton of pins:
0x04, 0x06, 0x08, 0x0a, 0x0b, 0x0c, 0x0d, 0x0e, 0x0f
Since there’s a lot of possible combinations of those I’d love to have some more knowledge of what that is supposed to do and if there’s some specific strategy that could improve my odds rather than trying random pins…
I’ve tried the “apply” button once, but it made the sound stop and showed a “device busy” error.
I suggest you check the sink Ports in the HiFi Profile
pactl list sinks
If response shows only stereo sink ports and no surround ports the onboard audio codec
probably supports stereo output only over HDMI
IMO if audio codec does not support surround audio there is not likely to be any way to retask the audio codec pins to support it
But If you want to keep trying to retask pins in hdajackretask I suggest you use alsa-info.sh to get detailed information about audio device
Apply now in hdajackretask will fail with device busy error if any software audio servers are running (e.g. PulseAudio). But Install boot override usually works if user has root privileges to create the override
I’ve uploaded the output of pactl list sinkshere.
I don’t see any hint of possible surround sound output in there, do you?
Also, here’s my output from alsa-info.sh
I gotta check if the Windows 11 that this notebook came with can do surround output. Will report back once I’ve tried that. I always thought outputting digital surround sound streams is not something that requires specific hardware…
UPDATE: on a first quick try I didn’t manage to get any sound output from Windows 11 via HDMI, gotta do more research on this…
UPDATE2: on my second try I managed to make Windows 11 output surround sound, so it’s not a hardware limitation.
UPDATE3: so one Windows update later, which also updated my devices firmware, after repairing the Manjaro UEFI boot-loader and trying to overwrite all those pins in hdajackretask with the Install boot override button the output from alsa-info.sh looks a little different, but sadly I don’t see any difference in the audio config UI or my Manjaro sound output.
before speculating about ANY software/manjaro/linux issues MAKE sure that your physical hdmi-cable DOES allow the extended audio feautures. there are too many different cable-configurations and even if your cable provides the video and standard audio signal it’s not guaranteed that your cable-display configuration enable the surround-option.
in your case: it should be minimum a hdmi-cable rev. 2.0B that enables multiple audio-channels. there are some cables rev. 1.4 that enable the so called “3D”-sound but this 3D-… is not standarized and it’s a gamble if it works or not.
Yes, I know that HDMI is very picky when it comes to shielding and the general noise level of the surround electromagnetic fields.
But since it’s no problem to output 4k60fps signals with my setup, and the surround sound output works fine using Windows 11 (after doing some research how to coax that joke of an OS to do so…) I doubt my current problem is hardware related.
so you’re using windos11-linux dual boot ? if so make sure that the “fast-boot” option in windows is disabled.
another helpful info is to provide the mandatory
please install pavucontrol from the package-manager. start it and check
in pavucontrol the option configuration the internal profil. can you reach 5.1-sound. if so try it and report
I have pavucontrol installed already. Where in it should I be able to switch to 5.1 (or 7.1) sound output?
On it’s last tab “Configuration” it shows me the same 2 profiles for the only item “sof-hda-dsp” the KDE-native audio config tool also shows:
Play HiFi quality Music
Off
I believe the above list should contain different profiles for stereo and various surround profiles instead.
On the “Output Devices” Tab I have 3 HDMI / DisplayPort Outputs shown, of which #1 = 3rd one listed seems to represent the physical HDMI output my my laptop has. It shows a drop-down “Port” that only has the one entry repeating it’s name with “(plugged in)” appended.
On the right end of the window above that drop-down I have 3 buttons for:
muting
unlocking separate left & right channel volume control
If surround audio works in Windows, the codec pin configurations can be obtained from a virtual Windows environment and applied to audio codec using ALSA tool hda-verb
What does this mean? Something like Windows running in a VM within Linux? Or the other way round like WSL?
I’ve opened the How-To guide you’ve linked and what environment this guide expects. Since he’s using apt-get I guess something debian based - But I’m unsure if that’s meant to be debian / ubuntu within WSL or as the Host-OS?
UPDATE: okey since he’s installing qemu inside the debian-based system, I guess that it’s meant to use Linux as native host OS and windows as the virtual machine’s OS.
Since we’re using Manjaro our package names differ in some cases, which includes qemu. What should I install to get this running?
UPDATE2: Since my laptop came with Windows11, I’m unsure if a virtual Windows10 that this guide suggests to use would be able to talk to my sound card, and even more, make it output surround sound.
Therefore I guess I should first try if I can make it work with Windows11. As the VM-Environment I guess I should start with the Manjaro included package quemu-dekstop. I’m unsure if that 4 year old “jcs-hda-dma” quemu fork the guide is suggesting to use adds anything essential for being able to allow the virtual windows to directly access the physical sound card and sniff the communication to be able to replicate this feature for linux afterwards.
