ROG Ally: HDMI audio cuts out frequently when docked (Bounty $60 USD)
This seems to have been posted a few other places around the net, but I couldn't find a post here about it, so I'm making one in the hopes someone can help me troubleshoot this.
By "dropouts" or "cuts out" I mean that all audio goes silent for a couple seconds, and then comes back.
ROG Ally on a USB-C dock (seems to happen on multiple docks). I've also heard the Ally X has the same issue.
The device basically has to be restarted for HDMI audio to even be usable. Attempting to dock it multiple times or take it out of sleep without restarting just results in delayed audio and constant dropouts.
But even when the device has been restarted, the HDMI audio still cuts out occasionally (I would say every few minutes there is an occurrence).
I am not used to troubleshooting things on bazzite, but I have linux experience and I am available to collect whatever information folks might be curious about.
Appreciate your time and any help you might be able to provide!
86 Replies
If there turns out to be a software solution to this, I'm happy to donate to whoever can figure it out.
$30 USD
Gamemode or desktop mode?
So far it’s been all in game mode, I have not tried desktop mode. I will take a look when I get home from work and see
Unless @Chas_Hodges already knows, they have the same issue on an ally x and may have tried desktop mode already
Ive seen it primarily in game mode too
To add my experience:
I tend to experience audio drop outs of about a 1/2 second every few minutes. At its worst, this can be multiple times a minute. At its best, after a fresh power cycle, it can be a good hour or so before the issue arises, but it will always come back eventually, more readily when resuming from sleep.
It is not a bandwidth issue - this is just as prevalent when idling on the home screen or when running at max gpu clocks with a 4k output. It is exclusive to HDMI though. It does not happen in handheld mode at all.
There is a possibility that TV choice makes a difference, but this has been very hard to pinpoint. In my house I have one 4k samsung screen, and a much older TV which may only output at 1080i which makes A/B testing difficult
Semi-recent kernel updates (circa 12/24) have made a little difference for the better which suggests there is a software fix out there
They haven't resolved the issue completely though
Anecdotally, recent updates in the last week or so have made things much worse with much more frequent cutouts
Fuck it, I'll match this bounty - if you're able to change the title of the post to $60, I'm in
Cant recreate on my Ally z1e with steam deck dock, audio works fine outputting to both a monitor(spectre c25) and tv (tcl 43s405). Have not tried an hdmi soundbar or whatever else though.
and you have the hdmi set as your audio output? can you share more about what dock you’re using?
Its the official Steam Deck dock. I use "External Device" set as the audio output. Make sure the "Family" one is maxed out though
Im just about to do some more testing on this, I don’t have an official SD dock but I’ll verify what I have set
I can test with the jsaux 5 in 1 dock as well. I'm on bone stock bazzite with nothing layered ,no tweaks done or anything.
Believe I’m on the jsaux as well. Ally z1e too.
Normally the issue does take quite some time to start popping up (~1hr ish maybe) but I’m gonna try popping in and out of sleep to induce it sooner
mine is not technically the jsaux dock but it looks so similar that I’m 90% sure it’s just a clone with identical hardware but from another Chinese brand. And I have a j5 create mini dock as well, just hdmi, power, and one usb port
I have it plugged into the jsaux into my tcl tv, will see if anything happens in an hour or so
Oh, the only thing I have changed is i am using LADV scheduler. Dont think thatll matter though. I have dark souls 2 w lighting engine running and will just let it sit for and hour or so more
Sleep is prevented when in a game, right? Or am I misremembering
Not sure, but i dont believe so, Im pretty sure ive fell asleep with a game on and woke up to the device asleep on the dock
gotcha. Are you just pressing buttons on yours occasionally? Trying to figure out how attentive I need to be w this thing. All my other times encountering the issue I’ve been actively playing games
Ill probably just disable sleep unless the power button is pressed
I play pretty consistently using hdmi on the steam deck dock and have never had this issue
However more recently I've been using display port with my 1080/240hz monitor instead and using and external sound card. So if this issue has appeared recently i havent seen it
Only audio bug i have had is while switching into gamescope, audio through the 3.5mm will pop in and out pretty violently once.
So…this is interesting. It seems no matter what I do on my LG C2 oled, I can NOT make this happen. It’s my bedroom tv so until now I’ve never really tried to hook up my ally to it, but I wanted to test things out and my s/o was watching tv in the living room.
I couldn’t even get the audio to become delayed.
Yet when I returned to the living room (a lesser LG but still a 4k tv), I was able to make the delayed audio happen nearly instantly. I’m trying to see if I can induce the dropouts now.
Edit: yeah, audio dropouts as well
Haven't had any audio dropouts, cuts or hizzing, delay or anything on mine so far.
you have it in the monitor atm?
I use the JSAUX HB1201S dock plugged to my monitor via Display Port with my OG Z1E and the only audio problem I've had is that it always defaults to the inner speakers at boot
This is very anecdotal, but after seeing this from a windows user, I find it very interesting that I can easily recreate the issue on my 60hz tv but not on my 120hz tv
No, 4k60hz tcl4 series
Have you tried changing the refresh rate as it says in that comment?
I couldn’t even get the delay on my 120hz tv, but on my 60hz tv it’s basically “dock it, put it to sleep, wake it up, boom the audio is delayed by over a second”
The issue is that in bazzite gamescope I don’t think you can control refresh rate, at least not that I’ve seen
I will try the sleep and wake thing to see if i can replicate that
You can select different edid values in steam display settings and if you disable frame rate lock you get a slider for display fps instead, although tht might only be on the built in display
It should give you the option in the change resolution settings. For instance:
4K @ 120Hz
4K @ 60Hz
etc. Depending on your TV and connection
Still no delay after device was put into sleep and woken up again
Anything really youve done specifically with your install at all? Again, im on bone stock bazzite besides I used hhd to switch to LADV.
Nah, I’ve done 0 tweaks to mine except what the bazzite docs said to do for this device, ex. changing settings in HHD
Try this: in console type "ujust install-lact" afterwards you'll find LACT in utilities. From there, set to maximum clocks for the gpu. Unfortunately this will draw more power, and you'll have to change it back undocked which isn't ideal. I just want to see if it works
You can just do this in hhd without lact
Just go into the tdp section and use a fixed clock maxed out
Ah yeah you're right, I keep forgetting that's a thing on handhelds
Listen to them lol
For some reason AMD drivers are a little wonky with HDMI audio, and this was the fix for my living room pc
Is this something you can set from Steam OS / Gamescope?
I don’t believe so, at least not that specific. You can only set 60, 120, etc. it doesn’t have the specific decimal numbers
Experimented with some Pipewire conf settings this evening - it's improved if not eliminated the problem
It's too late now as I need to go to bed, but I'll collate what I've tweaked and share tomorrow evening after work
Could be placebo, but I feel like the tweaks I've made have massively reduced drop outs and also made them less severe when they do occur
I've also been having these issues. Would love a solution!! Look forward to your results @Chas_Hodges
Hey! Sorry about the delay in getting back to everyone. I explored these tweaks, but after more intensive testing, I'm not confused they make any difference
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/18iv272/solved_random_hdmi_audio_dropouts_midgame_pipewire/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/771884
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How do I disable audio sink suspend on idle using WirePlumber in Fe...
In Fedora 35, WirePlumber has replaced pipewire-media-session as the audio session manager. There is a highly annoying problem with audio on many built-in soundcards on Linux where the audio sink is
There's some other *.conf files I've been trying to explore too, but I don't think I have anything concrete to share
the more I mess around the more it seems like this is actually a completely unfixable problem, possibly due to a core issue with the Ally hardware and how Bazzite / Fedora handles audio with Pipewire
Sounds like we might have to wait for official steam OS Support . Hopefully coming soon
spent more time fiddling with settings last night - it's all placebo, from my testing
I increase or decrease say, the latency figures for pipewire - audio will then be fine for half an our before a series of cut outs, or it'll cut out immediately within a minute or rebooting the machine
no rhyme or reason at all
interestingly, using the terminal command 'pw-top' you can see in real time which audio streams are running, and their latency etc
it also logs any errors where a sample over or under runs
I caught one of these blips live, and it did register as an error
I'm not really sure what to do with this information, but at least it confirms there has been an audio error, which eliminates the TV / monitor as the issue - it's definitely related to either the Ally hardware and how it interacts with bazzite's linux implementation, or is a wider Fedora issue that may affect many people (though they might not be as susceptible to noticing)
I think pushing latency settings to be more lenient using config files has helped slightly, but the drops are still there
Interestingly, I've been experimenting with some Xreal AR glasses this week plugged in over usb-c and I don't think I've noticed any drops at all, even though I'd assumed these would still be fed as an HDMI display
I think it has something to do with whether or not the usb-c device/dock has its own audio chip, or it asks the host to pass through its audio.
I have one specific dock I’m still testing with, but so far I haven’t had it drop audio a single time, and sleep/wake doesn’t seem to mess with the audio latency at all
Which dock?
This one from j5create (model JCA399)
Interestingly, it is capable of doing 4k144hz. I don't know if that has anything to do with it's apparent ability to have better audio or not
I combined it with a cheap 4x usb hub to make it into my new living room setup
It even works with my nintendo switch, amazingly enough, even though it doesn't advertise being able to do that
They don't sell them anywhere in the UK unfortunately, otherwise I'd be game to explore it too
Been trialling more config tweaks
Played for 3 or 4 hours tonight, a range of games, no blips
May mean absolutely nothing and tomorrow could be awful again, but it might mean something!
update to this dock, I still haven't had any dropouts on extended sessions, but I have noticed that sleep/wake does still have the slowly increasing latency. It just took a while for me to notice it was happening
Believe I have the same issue, running bazzite stable on ROG ally X, with a UGreen dock connecting to Denon AVR-s760h to LG C1
I'm willing to throw another $20 for someone to fix this. Surely for $80 this issue is worth a good look,maybe by Devs if they have time 😂
@j0rge
post that in an issue or on the forums, I don't own an ally
Tweaking latency settings using pipewire configs absolutely makes a difference, at least on my setup
Higher latency = less dropouts
Using latency targets of 1024 let me play for a few hours without a single drop out, but with obvious audio delay
512 was still very stable but noticeable especially if a game features a video of people speaking (I've been playing Tetris Forever which is primarily documentary footage
256 makes the audio feel better, but I had several drop outs within the first 15 minutes of booting the machine
There are very likely additional considerations depending on dock being used
When you say "slowly increasing latency", do you mean the audio latency being way behind the visuals? I made a topic about it yesterday:
https://discord.com/channels/1072614816579063828/1350231563299848415
If you are facing similar issues as me, id be glad to contribute a bit to this bounty if it gets solved.
gang, I may have stumbled upon something useful
if anyone wants to test, place this file in this location: ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/
With this *.conf file in place, and I don't think I've heard a blip in the last couple hours
@J. Scolding @cave monster @DuckyAtSea
if this file helps others, I can then work backwards to see if the other settings I've changed within pipewire are even necessary
i've uninstalled bazzite now, if i get time this weekend I will re install and give it a go
Another hour of testing, no dropout
I'm heading out for a bit, so the next test is whether resuming from sleep still introduces potential audio problems
Came back, resumed, played for an hour, no blips
Suspended, resumed a bit later, played for nearly 2 hours, no blips
If anyone can test the config files I shared, I think we might be close to solving this
If it still gives anyone issues with dropouts I can share the other tweaks I made to pipewire - at the moment I think it would just complicate testing though
@Chas_Hodges thanks! I'll apply this and try it tomorrow.
Are you saying that the config will add a 128ms delay to all audio output? It might be okay for dialogues but I hope the delay is not noticeable in game effects.
The delay doesn't apply to the config file I shared, it's a different setting I've been exploring - I've updated the original message to be clearer for anyone joining this conversation late!
The bazzite defaults are way higher though
For now, I'm just trying to figure out if the Alsa config I shared is targeting the right issue
I'm learning as I go with pipewire / wireplumber and Linux in general
Alright, appreciate your efforts. This might be the only thing that I haven't been able to find a fix for in the last couple months.
Fix works for me. This fix is the only change made from default bazzite-deck. Thank you!
How long did you play for?
I'm going to try and have another long session today - in theory the numbers in that shared *.conf can be tweaked slightly, but I think this is 100% the right track at least
Played for like an hour or so and didnt notice any cutout.
There was a noticable delay thought and it kept getting worse. By the end of the session the delay was about a second or so.
Restarting the device fixed the delay but as I played more it kept getting worse. I renamed the .conf ext and then the delay was gone. Not sure if it was directly related to this but I haven’t noticed any delays in the past.
I’ll do some more tests later tonight and will let you know.
I added the 50-alsa-config.conf file to wireplumber, and also tested out a few other things i found on arch linux wiki, but I still have the same audio delay after waking up from sleep :(
The only workaround is to restart or just use shut down instead of suspend when docked, since suspend just keeps breaking the audio when docked.
If i were to guess, setting the suspend to 0 for wireplumber and pipewire seems to be overwritten somewhere else
I've never really had this creeping delay issue - it may well be connected, but it could be something different
I'll share my other config files to see if they help you, will upload shortly when I'm back at my desktop
These files all go in ~/.config/pipewire/
These aim to reduce latency, and change suspend times on certain services, so it might be related to what you both mention re: delay drift
OK, testing now specifically with a rhythm game I can feel the gradual delay
Right, done some more fiddling. My current findings:
With the combo of the wireplumber config and some Pipewire config tweaks I don't think there's audio delay on my setup, even after sleep. What there is however is two back to back audio drop outs that seem to appear roughly 20 minutes from starting play whether on a fresh boot or after sleep / suspend
I have no idea what this means
The amount of time I've wasted troubleshooting though, I genuinely don't believe this is a fixable bug with the current implementation of Bazzite
Maybe it's an OS issue, maybe it's a Linux driver issue, maybe it's a Rog Ally X issue
No one on the Bazzite team has ever been bothered by it enough to think it was worth proper investigation so I'd say anyone that experiences any audio issues with a setup that includes a Rog Ally device outputting over HDMI whilst running Bazzite, I think you're straight out of luck
Maybe when SteamOS rolls out properly (what are we now, 3 years and still waiting?) we'll see a solution
Really thought this might have been the fix, but after a week's further testing it's a big 👎
I've seen other threads where the devs were involved but seems the issue was brought back after updates. Example: https://discord.com/channels/1072614816579063828/1301052644151918654
It might be that devs are not able to replicate it, don't have the devices, or just deem it as very niche and there are other priority things to look at.
Something that I've noticed is that the delay does exist by default without any configs or tinkering, and it does start to build up. Whenever the cutout happens then the audio is synchronised again and there is no delay. Maybe that's the reason why the cutout happens? It realizes that the audio is behind and it needs to reset it?
Anyway appreciate your time on this and hopefully in the future a random kernel/Bazzite update will fix it 🥹
The most annoying issue is that it's impossible to know of my problem is the same as yours or the thread you linked etc etc
They could all be slightly different setup / hardware issues that just happen to be manifesting in a broadly similar way
Mines at a stage now where it's annoying but not prevalent enough to be super problematic, but I haven't given up yet!
Yeah that's the thing. Everyone is running different devices/docks/hdmi-cables/tvs/earc-soundbars/home-theater etc. It's hard to point the finger on what the problem is.
I changed the TV recently and the cutout is very short now. On my Sony it used to be like 2-3 seconds, on the LG C4 the cutout is about half a second. Still noticeable though.
https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/issues/851 this is probably related and everyone is having a differnt type of stutter/cutout.
GitHub
Audio stuttering in many games in Gamescope w/ 6700XT · Issue #851 ...
Describe the bug I have been using bazzite since before Fedora 39 with this system, and I'm not sure when, but in the last few months the system has developed frequent audio stutters when runni...
I'm going to setup a eGPU soon and will see how the cutout will look like. It will replace my dock and use the GPU HDMI output, my HDMI 2.0 will be replaced with a 2.1 one etc (might give DP to HDMI a chance).
So there are some variables in there and I'm curious if/how it will change.
My 2c worth of variables:
I have a Rog Ally X with a jsaux HB1201S dock. I have the growing audio delay issue when plugged directly into my LG C1 tv and have audio cut outs when connecting it to my Denon AVR. On Windows if I install the audio drivers for the Ally from the Asus website then it fixes both these issues. Obviously not really an option on Bazzite. I have also tried a white label dock and it had the same issues.
I also have a desktop with a RX 7600 GPU. I have no audio issues on either the TV or the AVR with it.
For now I am using a cheap USB -> Toslink adapter for the Rog Ally. No audio issues there.
That's interesting. I have a Sonos Beam Gen2 that has one HDMI output (connected to TV via eARC). So the Rog Ally has to output to the HDMI so that the TV takes it in and forwards it to the Soundbar.
There is a HDMI to Optical adaptor that I have from Sonos but not sure how to connect it.
Does your AVR have multiple outputs? Can you briefly explain how your device/avr/tv are connected?
When connected to the TV I tested with both the TVs speakers and using eARC to feed the sound to the AVR. Had slowly growing audio delay in both cases.
When connecting the Ally to the TV I had Ally -> TV -eArc-> AVR or Ally -> TV. These had the delay.
When connecting the Ally to the AVR it was Ally -> AVR -> TV. This had cut outs.
Current setup is Ally -> TV for video and Ally -USB Toslink-> AVR for sound. This works.
Not sure HDMI to optical would help. I suspect the issue is in the audio being sent over HDMI so grabbing it from there would probably not help. A USB to optical adapter skips the problem because it is a separate audio output device.
Does your DVR have multiple input ports? Mine has just a HDMI port so it's tricky. I'll see if HDMI splitters might work. If it does I'm thinking of something like this:
Sonos -> HDMI -> HDMI Splitter.
Splitter has one HDMI -> TV/eArc so that regular TV outputs to soundbar.
Splitter has another HDMI -> Optical adaptor (HDMI to Optical) -> Toslink adapter (Optical to USB) -> Rog Ally Dock.
Are you able to get full audio channels using the Toslink adaptor? Like Dolby Digital/PCM and 5.1 channels?
Mine has multiple inputs so I can just directly plug optical audio into it. Never played with hdmi splitters so no real comment from me there.
Sadly I can only get 2.0 stereo from it.
Oh okay. I'm not sure if I want to lose the other channels from it, and HDMI splitters compatible with Sonos seem to be very expensive ($200+) so that's a no go for me. Thanks for the insight though and glad you've found your solution.
At the moment I use a straight USB-C to HDMI cable, without any dock as I had mixed results with the docks I'd experimented with
When a dock is introduced (like the JSAUX @GrumpyTonberry mentioned) how is the signal being drawn out? As an HDMI compliant signal or as a separate digital signal that the dock is then spitting out as HDMI 2.1?
Not sure what my dock is but I use a legion go. And get the audio drops out issue. Strangely I don't get it in my 3400x1440p monitor only my 4k TV. But I've given up now and sticking with windows until the official steam OS release
Bought an HB1201S dock for the Rog Ally X as it was reduced on Amazon.
With my previous solution (pipewire config tweaks and a direct USB-C to HDMI cable straight to the TV) from fresh boot I get occasional audio dropouts for a split second, but can sometimes play without issue for 1-2 hours before I catch one.
With the JSAUX dock there are far more sustained drops within 10 minutes of boot, with this being significantly worse if waking from sleep
As the dock is able to do 4k at very high framrates I thought it might help if there was some sort of buffer issue, but it seems not
Worth noting that the pipewire tweaks make no difference with the JSAUX - I deleted then all and ran stock and the blips and dropouts were pretty much identical as with them applied
Thanks for giving it a try and reporting back. I'm hoping to have my eGPU setup finished this weekend (if all parts arrive) and I'll see how that will react to the HDMI audio cutouts. It will be quite different as there will be no usbc dock (eGPU dock instead) but the HDMI will be connected directly to the external graphics card. Not sure if the result will be helpful to anyone else as it's a very niche case but maybe it can give us a better idea.
Tbh i have this problem with bazzite too where hdmi if it is via HDMI a constant popping sound will be heard when using the JSAUX dock HB0609.
This constant popping is not heard in windows. I assume it maybe some thing not working out between jsaux dock and bazzite. I just bought another dock and no popping sound is heard.
I've had mixed results with my eGPU setup. Initially I noticed one or two cutouts in the first tries. Then in order to get something else fixed (booting into eGPU) I had to disable the GPU power management and since then I have not had any issue with audio cutouts through the eGPU.
rpm-ostree kargs --append=amdgpu.runpm=0
I'm not sure if this have any effect while connecting with a dock through HDMI (no eGPU).
Also browsing the ChimeraOS Discord I noticed a thread discussing a HDMI audio cutout. I don't think I can link it here but this is what they proposed fixed for them. It's interesting because it seems its related to power management as well.
I assume this is just a command to run in terminal?
yeah. if it doesn't help with the audio cutouts then change it to
runpm=1 and it should revert it.right, done some testing on this
On the ROG Ally X, despite feeling promising, I'm still seeing the same bug
I mentioned a bit further up that my setup is now as follows: Rog Ally X -> direct USBC to HDMI cable -> TV
WIth the pipewire config tweaks I'm using I can play from a fresh reboot for upwards of an hour without any blips, and from sleep for around 20/30 minutes without blips
What's strange now is that I consistently hear two audio cut outs, one after the other at around 20/30 minutes, and then seemingly not again
Could audio be subtly drifting out of sync like someone else mentioned, and then this blip is the sound 'correcting' itself? Would it then drop out again the same time later?
I'm tempted to time my play session next time to see if the bug is as repeatable as it seems
It still suggests to me though that a combination of pipewire tweaks may still be the answer
I haven't given up! As much as these things drive me insane, I do get a weird sort of hyperfixated joy from having a bug to chase
Yeah, I've noticed this as well. Seems like the cutout tries to fix the auto of sync audio.
If I was better at maths, I might look at timing when the blips happen, and trying to figure out which values under pipewire could be raised or lowered accordingly
if its consistent it would suggest there's a gradual buildup
which in theory would be influenced by the numbers in the pipewire config