No analog sound through an external amplifier on Rpi 3B v1.2

[JoeRejimen]

You are not entitled to any support for a $35 computer, try getting free support from Microsoft or Apple or HP or Dell (even when you've paid $1000 for your laptop).

If you want official support you're going to have to pay someone to support you, expect that to cost around USD$750/day or more.

Is this the official position statement from Raspberry Pi foundation?

[DougieLawson]

You are not entitled to any support for a $35 computer, try getting free support from Microsoft or Apple or HP or Dell (even when you've paid $1000 for your laptop).

If you want official support you're going to have to pay someone to support you, expect that to cost around USD$750/day or more.

Is this the official position statement from Raspberry Pi foundation?

I think you'll find it is exactly that when you ask them. Send an email to info@raspberrypi.org or fill in their contact form at https://www.raspberrypi.org/contact/

[fruitoftheloom]

I suggested using Pi-Imager to create a bootable Raspberry Pi with Desktop OS SD Card and then fully updating, but got a weird response so not sure in this fog if it helped.

This has been done. I do not know what response you are referring to or what your definition of weird is, but this descibes the result of trying the latest image. It is unacceptably slow, and we have already planned the course material, so no, we are not upgrading. This is the gist of it.

Regards this Forum the hosting is paid by RPF / RPT, though it is actually run totally and utterly on a community voluntary basis.

Since Raspberry foundation is running this portal under its own domain, and we have a customer-supplier relationship with Raspberry, I will continue reaching out to Raspberry Foundation through this resource.

OK that is fair enough, if you want to run an out of date unsupported Raspbian Operating System, though did notice you have PulseAudio installed which was not recommended in Raspbian Stretch / Buster, as conflicts with BlueAlsa:

https://github.com/Arkq/bluez-alsa



Apologies for trying to help and not sure where to go from here as the only time I ran into I/O speed issues was using an unbranded SD Card which died very quickly.

Good luck solving your issues

[jdb]

Wow this thread is quite the ride. And disappointing - how much more effort is it to sling mud in typed form than it is to just ignore this thread?

If I'm not mistaken firmware for the RPI3 and 4 now switches off the PWM engines needed for analog sound to save some energy, and you have to purposefully turn them back on so you can use analog audio.
Sorry I don't know the details, this is from memory, I think it was in the launch blog of the RPI4.

You are mistaken. It doesn't. The *default* is for firmware to use HDMI for audio unless there isn't an HDMI audio sink connected, in which case the firmware will route to the analogue jack.

I will ask some other moderators what is up with this.

Remember that all posters here are helping you voluntarily and they do react to how things are asked, I actually got a complaint about your behaviour that brought me to this thread. I agree that just turning PWM off without extensive warnings is a bad thing, but analog audio isn't really popular any more, and the RPI400 doesn't even have an analog audio port anymore, so analog audio is discouraged.

Ill see what I can do for you.

Analogue audio is and will be supported for the entire life of products that have the associated connections available.

Given that the OP can play sound through the jack with omxplayer (which uses the firmware interfaces directly), and has a negative result with whatever OS installed, the problem is with the OS or its configuration. Modifications from the default install need to be listed in detail, otherwise any debug effort is going to be wasted.

[JoeRejimen]

Analogue audio is and will be supported for the entire life of products that have the associated connections available.

This was my assumption too. If the interface is on the board, it has to be supported, since we've bought the product in this configuration.

Given that the OP can play sound through the jack with omxplayer (which uses the firmware interfaces directly), and has a negative result with whatever OS installed, the problem is with the OS or its configuration. Modifications from the default install need to be listed in detail, otherwise any debug effort is going to be wasted.

There weren't any modification until I realized that no sound is playing. Then the only one I've made was via raspi-config, to force Analog. It made no difference. For all practical purposes, this is a vanilla OS on a vanilla board.

though did notice you have PulseAudio installed which was not recommended in Raspbian Stretch / Buster, as conflicts with BlueAlsa:

Actually, as soon as I ran into the sound issue, I've uninstalled PA, so it is not there all this time.

Bottom line is, since all this time has been wasted by a troll farm, I've replaced every file association and every sound command I have access to with omxplayer and called it a day. The course starts on Mon and we do not have time to waste anymore on this. ALSA is broken in the release that demonstrates satisfactory performance. I've compared all /usr/share/alsa files, found differences with that in the latest release, but they are insignificant. I've tried to sync files, and that made precious little difference. Something keeps resetting ALSA volume to zero on Analog, and I treat this as an untested release. Even the location of ALSA samples is wrong in one of the scripts.

[mahjongg]

I will ask some other moderators what is up with this.

Remember that all posters here are helping you voluntarily and they do react to how things are asked, I actually got a complaint about your behaviour that brought me to this thread. I agree that just turning PWM off without extensive warnings is a bad thing, but analog audio isn't really popular any more, and the RPI400 doesn't even have an analog audio port anymore, so analog audio is discouraged.

Ill see what I can do for you.

This is the answer I got:

Firmware behaves the same as it has always done for the last 3+ years, modulo any bugfixes that stop analogue audio from breaking. The only major difference in the latest OS release is that the ALSA driver now exposes independent devices for the underlying output channels (HDMI/PWM) rather than having subdevices.

So It seems I remembered wrong, but it seems there are now two pathways for audio, that can be enabled separately.

[fruitoftheloom]

I will ask some other moderators what is up with this.

Remember that all posters here are helping you voluntarily and they do react to how things are asked, I actually got a complaint about your behaviour that brought me to this thread. I agree that just turning PWM off without extensive warnings is a bad thing, but analog audio isn't really popular any more, and the RPI400 doesn't even have an analog audio port anymore, so analog audio is discouraged.

Ill see what I can do for you.

This is the answer I got:

Firmware behaves the same as it has always done for the last 3+ years, modulo any bugfixes that stop analogue audio from breaking. The only major difference in the latest OS release is that the ALSA driver now exposes independent devices for the underlying output channels (HDMI/PWM) rather than having subdevices.

So It seems I remembered wrong, but it seems there are now two pathways for audio, that can be enabled separately.

The changes to ASLSA were implemented in Raspberry Pi Operating System May 2020:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/latest ... -may-2020/


The OP is using an older Raspbian Release as noted in his first post where he states a 2019 kernel

Linux raspberrypi 4.19.66-v7+ #1253 SMP Thu Aug 15 11:49:46 BST 2019


Though the OP stated that the May 2020 Raspberry Pi ARMHF Operating System is more broken than the Raspbian Stretch ARMHF circa July 2019..