Quiet Audio

[WoodMill]

This may just be a rhetorical question. I don't know that I will fix this unless it's an easy fix.

I've wired up a USB sound card instead of going the official way. Just couldn't find components to build.

I have it wired: USB Sound > AdaFruit Mono Amp > POT > Headphones > Speaker

The sound with the POT all the way up isn't as loud as I would expect it to be. It's pretty quiet. Also there was a bad hum. But I remembered that the Amp had a POT of its own, so I turned that up. To my surprise, the hum actually went away, but the sound is still the same loudness. With the Amp Pot in it's stock position, the volume wheel went from 100% to 0% in about a quarter of a turn. That's something I read was common. But with the Amp Pot turned up, that 1/4 of a turn is now down to about 1/8 of a turn. So even less turning to go from 100% to 0%.

The amp was powered directly from the PiZero. If you're all visual people and like to analyse photos to look at my wiring, I will take some tonight.

Any ideas for the low volume? or is that how it is?

[Chedda]

Try powering the amp via the powerboost or power panel if you have one. Also, where do you have the amp powered at on the pi? Is it the 3.3v or the 5v?

[Zero]

I had an issue with my build that sounded similar. I changed the volume level in software and it fixed mine. Have you changed the volume level in alsamixer for your build?

Or maybe you haven't installed it all.

Try this:

PulseAudio controls underlying ALSA-level volume controls. To change the ALSA-level volume controls directly, you can do the following:

Open a terminal, or SSH in.
Enter "alsamixer" and press the Enter key.
You will now see a user interface. In this user interface, you can do the following:
Select your correct sound card using F6 and select F5 to see recording controls as well
Move around with left and right arrow keys.
Increase and decrease volume with up and down arrow keys.
Increase and decrease volume for left/right channel individually with "Q", "E", "Z", and "C" keys.
Mute/Unmute with the "M" key. An "MM" means muted, and "OO" means unmuted. Note that a bar can be 100% full but still be muted, so do check for this.
Exit from alsamixer with the Esc key.

A caveat here: When you mute or unmute something, pulseaudio might pick it up and mute and unmute other controls, as well as PulseAudio's main mute.

[WoodMill]

I've only done testing just to make sure that my wiring worked. I haven't gotten to the Powerboost portion of my install yet. I used the pads under the power socket of the RPi. Those are 5v, correct?

And haven't done anything software related yet either. I'll see what happens when I finalize the install with the powerboost/power pad, and if that doesn't make any difference, I'll look into the software route.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[Chedda]

I would suggest running the 5V off of the GPIO. You could be causing power disruption since the pi draws from the same pad. Also, it adds power protection after the fact.

[WoodMill]

Instead of creating a new thread, I'll just add to this one since it still deals with audio.

So last night I finished my build! Feels pretty good when you connect everything and power it on and see the Retro Pie screen, and then boots to Emulation Station. Everything worked....Except for the audio.

But I think I know what I did wrong. I forgot to connect the amplifyer to the powerstrip. The USB sound card has power. And all other cables are properly connected except that the amp has no power.

Now, I would normally say, yes, that's probably why I have no sound, but within RetroPie, when I hit Start and go into the sound option, the volume is set to 0. When I move it up to 100, it does not save. It goes back down to zero.

So even if the Amp has no power, shouldn't the OS recognize that it has a sound card? It looks like it doesn't. Before putting this together, I did make sure that I went through the proper steps to get the sound card as the default audio.

I finished the build at midnight last night and booted it up to test. Haven't had enough time to fully test yet. I've got all day to think about it, so I figured if I could pinpoint what to do next before I get home, it will make it a quick fix...hopefully.

[WoodMill]

Update on my sound.

I fixed my sound problem last night. Not sure exactly when, where, or how though. I did in fact forget to power the amp. But still no audio. I then checked all connections, and then went to the command prompt to see if the Pi could see the sound card. It did not.

I de-soldered and re-soldered all the data connections since I was pretty sure power was fine. I came to the conclusion that it must have be that single USB port on the hub that went bad, since it was adjacent to the one I cut off. Maybe I nicked something?

After giving up and came to the realization that I probably won't have audio, I buttoned it up, and went in to play Mario World, and there was sound in the menu. Never heard that before. So I start up Mario World, no sound.

I know on my Pi3 some consoles are quieter than others. I went in and did the software audio fix by bumping up the sound. It was set to 20%. And Mario World had sound!

Thanks for the suggestion Zero. But man, what a pain that was last night. I know I didn't have sound in the menu to start. So I'm not sure at what point it came back, because I was testing it all along. It only came back after I gave it a good long stare and threw in the towel.

I know. Long story for a small thing.