sudomod

Everything else works, Touched up the sound pads a few times, still nothing.
No sound output at any level, in any game, on any system.
Confirmed that its not the speaker, i tested it with another speaker, same result.
No boot errors, and Audio settings within retroarch seems to see the audio interface.
Not sure what the issue is.
How can I test what the issue is beyond what I've already done?

Expand the > at the bottom here: https://github.com/kiteretro/Circuit-Ge ... successful and check all the BLUE pads

I tried it several times before making my initial post. I checked them all with my multimeter and they all had good continuity to the test points on the front of the gem board.
Is there any other troubleshooting I can do to figure out if theres another issue here?

When you measure the speaker resistance with a multimeter, what reading do you get? You can also probe the pads around the labelled ones (on the pi itself) to see if they have been shorted to neighbouring pins?

Welp thanks.
Turns out both the supplied speaker, and the test speaker i used were BOTH dead.
Yeah everything works great now. Thanks for the help. I'm a dummy.

Oh awesome! Well that's good news (other than the speaker). Sorry that the speaker wasn't working, replacements are pretty cheap and can be bought as this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/JCD-New ... 55984.html which hopefully will work.. again I'm sorry about this!

Since I feel these are several issues now: could this be a "problem" from the board amplifier? Maybe during switch on the power there is this well known "plop" impulse from the amp going to the speaker and since this speaker is really tiny his coil could burn? This is just a feeling!

Possibly, but I am aware that a number of speakers are faulty to start with, hence the resistance test. If your speaker gets physically hot then there could be an issue.

Speakers will burn out if too much current is passed for a prolonged period. You can measure the voltage of the + and - speaker pads (against GND (e.g. the micro USB metal)) and it should read 1/2 of 3.3v (so about 1.65v) for each. If one of the sides is higher/lower then the speaker will be burning through the difference in voltage. The amp is clever enough that if no sound is coming through the I2S that it powers off the speaker, so on boot you'll find it'll read 0v until you load something up and start playing sounds (a tiny POP is heard as it powers up the amp)

The issue would only be noticeable if the speaker was once working and now not, or if the speaker gets really hot

There is a loud POP every time the audio interface initializes when i start up an emulator. Happens for all of them.
I ended up just using the speaker from an old earbud and it sounds great though. So i now have a fully functioning unit!
Thanks for the help.

I'm really glad I found this, I was really stressing that I'd hammed up the solder pads, I didn't even think of checking the speaker. Sure enough, soldered a test speaker on instead and everything works... although a bit of distortion, hoping its the speakers fault.

A bit disappointing that I'll have to wait a bit more to finish this thing off, but whats another month I guess