HDMI Audio Controller Turns Itself On After Reboot

[Cheker]

Greetings everyone. I want my audio to go through analog output, and that it does, but the HDMI controller is turned on as well, and I don’t want this to be the case because I’ve noticed it causes lag in specific situations. Turning it off works, but only until I reboot. How do I make this permanent and/or tell pulse audio to ignore the HDMI? Cheers.

[OctopusOnFire]

Can you share the output of the command inxi -Ax ?

[Cheker]

Audio:     Device-1: Intel 100 Series/C230 Series Family HD Audio vendor: ASUSTeK 
           driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus-ID: 00:1f.3 
           Device-2: NVIDIA GP106 High Definition Audio vendor: ASUSTeK driver: snd_hda_intel 
           v: kernel bus-ID: 01:00.1 
           Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.4.108-1-MANJARO running: yes 
           Sound Server-2: JACK v: 0.125.0 running: no 
           Sound Server-3: PulseAudio v: 14.2 running: yes 
           Sound Server-4: PipeWire v: 0.3.24 running: yes

[OctopusOnFire]

I’m not familiar with pipewire and I don’t know if there might be a conflict there.

Anyway, the only thing I can think of is to check out the name of the sink you want to use as default with pactl list sinks . Then, in /etc/pulse/default.pa there should be a section at the bottom to make some devices default.

Audio is finicky in linux, especially now that we’re switching to pipewire. I suppose you’re using KDE, that also has some problems handling audio devices. I hope someone else can shine a bit more light into this issue if changing the config file doesn’t work. Good luck!

[Cheker]

While I think the problem isn’t so much analog being default or not, but rather HDMI being there at all, I did what you said. After both a restart and a complete shut down and turn on, HDMI so far has not come back. Let’s wait and see. Funniest thing is that pulseaudio claims sink 1 doesn’t exist. As per journalctl:

abr 13 19:38:55 cheker-pc pulseaudio[1151]: Sink 1 does not exist.

Except…it clearly does:

$ pactl list sinks
Sink #1
	State: SUSPENDED
	Name: alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3.analog-stereo
	Description: Built-in Audio Analog Stereo
	Driver: module-alsa-card.c
	(...)

So I don’t know what he’s on about. Let’s wait and see. Thanks!

EDIT: After a while I noticed that HDMI output comes back after the session locks. I think I fixed it by going back into /etc/pulse/default.pa and commenting the following line:

#load-module module-switch-on-port-available

Now it stays off no matter what. I’ll come back a few days from now and mark this as the solution if it really sticks.