I have tried a lot of things. I have looked at my UEFI settings, and the HD audio controller is enabled. No jumper is placed incorrectly (I suppose) and the integrated HD audio controller works perfectly fine on Windows. I do have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti with audio output and input support over HDMI, but that doesn’t stop the use of the integrated jack on Windows. On Linux, the audio device is displayed in my graphical settings in KDE Plasma, but there is no audio out- or input through the built-in audio jack. I’m using PipeWire and the latest stable release of Fedora. My system is completely up-to-date, and this issue has persisted since Fedora 36.
Why is there nobody who can try to help me with this? That’s such an old problem without any clues to a solution.
Hello, the problem here is that usually there are no problems with pipewire on Fedora and maybe nobody has ever dealt with a similar problem and neither have
However, you can make sure that you have the packages installed and that the services are running in the first place.
Packages installed
My system uses the following pipewire packages:
- qemu-audio-pipewire-8.1.1-1.fc39.x86_64
- pipewire-0.3.85-1.fc39.x86_64
- pipewire-libs-0.3.85-1.fc39.x86_64
- pipewire-utils-0.3.85-1.fc39.x86_64
- pipewire-pulseaudio-0.3.85-1.fc39.x86_64
- pipewire-gstreamer-0.3.85-1.fc39.x86_64
- pipewire-alsa-0.3.85-1.fc39.x86_64
and wireplumber packages:
- wireplumber-0.4.15-2.fc39.x86_64
- wireplumber-libs-0.4.15-2.fc39.x86_64
Services running
Try checking that both Pipewire and Wireplumber services are running.
systemctl --user status wireplumber.service
systemctl --user status pipewire.service
KDE System settings
If everything has been fine until now, you can take a look into the KDE System Settings and open the Sound tab and check the input and output devices.
You are saying that the built-in audio jack is not listed among the interfaces. What audio options (input and output) are actually listed?
What to try?
- Try every single device that is listed by the KDE and check that it is not connected with the audio jack. Sometimes, the device’s name is not self explanatory and you could easily overlook it.
Pipewire itself
If you are totally sure that the audio card that operates the built-in audio jack is not listed in KDE, you can obtain the info about the known interfaces from Pipewire itself. Check the output of this command:
pw-cli list-objects | grep port.alias
What does it give you? Could you post the list of ports here?
Drivers
If the device is not listed in the above output, Pipewire does not know about it, which could indicate that the system does not know about it.
Check, if the card is known to the system
lspci | grep [aA]udio
Is the built-in card listed here? If the card is listed here, but does not work, you might need some drivers which would be out of scope for this answer because I have never needed any.
If the card is not listed here, it means that the system does not know about the card which would indicate that it is switched off somewhere before the kernel gets loaded.
I’ll check once I’m home.
lcpsi | grep [aA]udio shows two devices:
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-h HD Audio Controller (rev 11)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GA104 High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
The second one is the GPU audio controller when using audio via HDMI.
The first one is the right one, I think. Additionally, it was hidden in the KDE settings and not selected, and now I got it working. There are different options though: Off; HiFi 2.0 Channels; HiFi 5.1 Channels; HiFi 7.1 Channels and Pro Audio.
Which is probably the best quality and easiest to use? I’m also comparing the audio quality with the quality of my external soundboard and trying to figure out whether it is really that much better. Especially because the cable is rather short and gives me less movement freedom than the external soundboard’s. Thank you for your help, and I hope you can answer my last questions and give your own opinion on whether the external soundboard is the better option when the cable is much longer that way.
As for the options, I would probably go with what you are really using. If you only have two speakers, then it is useless to use 5.1 or 7.1 as you only have two speakers and not five or seven.
Also, the audio for 5.1 is distributed among 5 speakers and not just two, so listening to it on two speakers could also limit the quality in certain scenarios.
As for your last question, I am not sure I understand the term “soundboard”, could you please elaborate a little more on what you mean by that? If you mean an “external soundcard” that you connect to your computer via USB or Firewire or Bluetooth, for instance something like a Focusrite Scarlett, then the quality of such card is always much better than the built-in one, unless it is a Bluetooth card. Sending sound via Bluetooth on Fedora has always resulted in lowered quality when compared it to the wired digital solution. So if hi-fi is required, do not use BT devices.
Important to note, however, is that external soundcard use a dedicated volume control, so you will not be able to the whole range of the volume using the Fedora system slider, because the maximum volume you are going to hear will be limited by the volume knob on the external card. This is mostly not a problem, when, for example, you set the volume on the external card to 50% and then use the system slider for the rest.
I only have two speakers. I do have an external USB soundcard as you said. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s better than my mainboard’s built-in one, as it shipped with my headset, which should be the Sharkoon Skiller SGH4, iirc. I’ll still compare them in different scenarios with different settings and so on, but it kinda felt like the bass is clearer and fuller with the built-in audio controller, which I had set to HiFi 7.1 when I was testing. I’ll talke a look at it later and maybe I’ll keep using the external soundcard. And for you to look at what soundboard is part of my mainboard compared to the one of the headphones, I’ll give you the mainboard model here: MSI MAG Z590 TOMAHAWK WiFi. It’s a thing I still have to play with. But at least I will be able to connect multiple wired devices when needed, for which I already know a situation it could be useful in.
And I think the general volume control is better with the external soundcard. It’s possible to make it really quiet, but also louder than what my system could do without it.
And regarding the support for multiple speakers, I think that the bandwidth of 5.1 and 7.1 is higher than 2.0, which would allow for more speakers on one audio jack, but it shouldn’ decrease quality with 2 speakers in certain scenarios. It can just send more audio data that way. Correct me if I’m wrong.
I am not sure, but I tend to believe that if you have a real 5.1 audio source, it will be better if the audio is recalculated by the audio device and not sent “as is” to the speakers, because with more speakers, the “spatial” effect is different than with just a regular stereo. If you source is just a stereo, than it makes no difference.
Even if there’s no drawback with more than 2.0 HiFi, it might be a waste of resources to use more with a headset with only two audio channels.