Desktop USB speakers have stopped outputting audio after latest update

Issues & Assistance
1

Hi, first time posting here, forgive me if I’m missing some info.

Within the last few days, after a system upgrade, my Cachy has stopped outputting any audio. I’ve read through similar issues but they mostly seem to do with Bluetooth audio.

I’m using newish Razer USB speakers and everything was working fine until I did a system update about 4 days ago. The speakers still show up as an output device and the volume bar visually shows that there’s music playing, but nothing’s being output from the speakers.

Just now I stuck the USB speakers’ output option to “Analog Stereo Output” and was rapidly messing with the volume level and was blasted with half a second of music, only for it to disappear again. Tried it again but it didn’t work and I don’t want to blow my eardrums out. How mysterious.

The USB speakers are connected to a Dell USB-C thunderbolt dock-monitor. I am dual-booting from an nvme drive with Windows 10 IoT Enterprise as the other OS. Audio still works great on the W10 install.

I thought maybe this’d be a fix ( [SOLVED] Sound settings reset on every reboot? (Fix for "Hardware Musical Chairs" with duplicate snd_hda_intel drivers) ) but I tried it to no avail. I seem to have way more “snd_hda_intel” modules. My “cat /proc/asound/modules” outputs were “snd_hda_intel” for 0-2, and “snd_usb_audio” for 3.

Bug report output: 562c1b8

2

why is your audio service (pipewire) running as root?
You’re the second person I’ve seen with that, but it’s not how it’s normally installed, The Pipewire service which activates your audio devices should be initialized and run by your user account, not by root.

Fix that and see if your sound works

3

I think I got it running under my user rather than root

ps -aux | grep pipewire
(my-name)      1784  0.0  0.0 137532 17424 ?        S<sl 19:40   0:00 /usr/bin/pipewire

Issue still exists

4

Another oddity: if I switch from the Digital Stereo (IEC958) profile to Analog Stereo Output and immediately play some music, it starts working. If I pause and unpause the music immediately, it still works. If I pause and wait 10 seconds and unpause, it’s silent again. Digital Stereo (IEC958) never works, however.

Makes me think some sort of hibernate feature in the speakers might be miscommunicating with the recent Cachy update?

5

possibly set the btusb to not power save or sleep

6

I was getting the nagging feeling that maybe it was some user error on my part that caused these issues, so just in case, I’ve nuked and re-installed the Cachy partition. As soon as everything updated, I confirmed the speakers still don’t work

I believe I set the btusb to not power save or sleep via a persistent rule, but that didn’t change anything.

But now… It seems like if I put the volume at 35% or higher, they start working (loudly - their volume increments are quite sensitive). 34% or below is completely muted. What???

Updated bug report: ef23d89

7

I’m still very new to linux so, do your own research with every tip/help you get from me. That being said, i think this should maybe help you.

i hope it helps..

8

I have the Soundblaster X4 USB-Soundcard and I have to set it up with the creative software in windows to play 5.1 sound in Linux. And every time I unplug my PC, I have to do it again.

Maybe Razer has a Tool too and you could set it up in Windows?

9

Thank you for this, this does seem like the exact same issue. I will create an account and submit a ticket soon and see where that gets me

10

Razer has Synapse on Windows, but it’s got no Linux options that I can find. Some people were recommending OpenRazer but others were saying it bricks their installs.

I’ll see if the PipeWire folks can help out with this or else I may just have to look at getting rid of anything Razer

11

What I meaned it is, that changes in the windows app will be saved onto the device. And because of that it could be working in linux again.

Try this: open “Volume Control” app in the cachyos start menu and change the settings.

And the good old: unplug the power cable and press “power on” on the pc for 30 seconds or so. And see if that worked.

12

Okay this has finally been fixed internally.

Turns out this was an ALSA bug the whole time. A quirk has been added and has been rolled out to CachyOS, and as of about a week ago, my speakers are magically working as intended.

Huge shoutout to Pauli from the Pipewire team for dealing both with me and this bug. Here’s the thread where it all went down.

Happy ending. Thanks everyone in this thread for your help