So the issue is as follows, I run my sound through my OLED through HDMI on the graphics card. Whenever the sound is played as Digital Stereo, I get a crackling noise coming from any sound source. If I change it to 5.1 or 7.1, no sound issues, however this does mean if a app or game doesn't have the options for changing sound output in them, audio will go missing like voices.
If anyone knows what can solve this issue, or at least point me in the right direction to find the answer, it would be greatly appreciated.
The reason you would be losing some audio such as voices is most likely that the voice are going through the centre channel, which may or may not be setup, given it's just a tv (I doubt it would be, same as rear channels). There's a few things that could be causing this:
First thing I would try is this in terminal:
pulseaudio -k
This will restart the pulseaudio and see if that fixes it easy enough. Not a permanent solution, just a stopgap.
Another few options to try:
In /etc/pulse/default.pa
Add tsched=0 to line load-module module-udev-detect, then reboot pulse with pulseaudio -k
In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf:
Set Pulse default-sample-rate to 48000 and then reboot pulse with pulseaudio -k
Set enabled-deferred-volume = no and comment out the lines for default-sample-rate and alternate-sample-rate, then restart pulse with pulseaudio -k
Sometimes setting the sample rate to 44100hz in the default sample rate will help, sometimes it's 48000. It's dependandant on what the systems seem to like the most.
Sorry that this is such a long list. There's so many things that can be wrong with audio that there's a lot of things to try that may or may not work depending on every system config. For mine, my issue was with the tsched option, but for my laptop I had to use a different solution entirely.
Alternatively, install all ALSA packages except those marked OSS and JACK via Synaptic Package Manager, available in Software. Also install QasMixer and the two other qas packages. Next install Audacious and in Sound Settings change from Pulse Audio to ALSA. For more information:
You could try it with installing Pulse Audio Volume Control. It is a Tool to set up Audio Output and Input. You can install it with the Terminal Command sudo apt install pavucontrol
applecheeks37, your first thing worked. After running that command, turned the audio to Digital Audio Stereo, and tested a few programs, sounds coming out as expected, no missing voices. While not a concern at this point, for more my curiosity, why wouldn't it resolve with just a shut down of the PC? Feels like that terminal command did exactly what a shut down of the system would resolve.
Eh, problem seems solved for now, so again, thank you all. Will probably be back once I start digging deep into Zorin and Linux as a whole, trying to squeeze everything I can out of it.
Glad to hear it's working. Sometimes audio just gets stuck in a setting and needs a manual restart to get it kicked in gear again. It shouldn't be something that happens too often, but the nice thing about Linux is anytime you need a quick check to fix something, is usually just a terminal command away
