Sometimes no sound through HDMI

weiserlinker

Hi,
I got a new raspberry pi 3 B and installed the latest retropie build. When I play games, sometimes the sound disappears and comes back a few seconds later. This happens mostly with snes and gameboy games. I tried using different emulators and settings, but it didn't help.
With for example psx games there are no sound dropouts.

mediamogul

@weiserlinker

It's likely a post-processing feature of your television. Take a look through the menus for anything that might normalize audio volume and turn it off.

weiserlinker

I turned all the tv features off now, tested different hdmi cables and the problem still is there

mediamogul

@weiserlinker

Just to rule it out completely, do you have another television you can test on to see if the problem is happening there as well?

weiserlinker

Yes. Tested it on two other tvs, but still the same.

mediamogul

@weiserlinker

Very strange indeed. I can't think of anything related to RetroArch/RetroPie that would cause audio to fade in and out like that. Do you run your audio through any kind of receiver or other component at all?

weiserlinker

Only through an hdmi extension cable. But I connected the pi directly without the extension and the problem still occurs.

Capeman

Turn this setting on in config.txt just in case it's the tv processing the DVI+sound signal wrong, this will force the hdmi output to act like a normal dvd/blueray player and not a PC signal.
hdmi_drive=2

Make sure your HDMI cables are not cheapo chinese junk, i had an hdmi cable extension that i used on my pi zero that caused crackled image and audio noise, upgraded to an expensive one and all problems went away.

weiserlinker

As I said, I used only the HDMI cable and the sound still disappears sometimes. I use th Wii U HDMI cable, so it;s not a cheap one.
And the setting hdmi_drive is already set to 2.

backstander

@weiserlinker
I just got a new TV (Hitachi Roku TV) and I've been having audio dropping issues but I hadn't had a lot of time to really test and troubleshoot the issue but I've noticed after extended play in Kodi, that my audio starts dropping but I'll hear part of a sound every couple seconds or so (happens both in and outside of Kodi). I'm not sure if our issues are related.

Another thing you might try along with adding "hdmi_drive=2" is to also add this to /boot/config.txt:

# Pretends all audio formats are supported by display, allowing passthrough of DTS/AC even when not reported as supported.
hdmi_force_edid_audio=1

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Sound-Issues/#users-configurations

pjft

Have you tried setting audio_sync to on in RetroArch? I'm not sure it solves the same thing you're experiencing, but I had audio distortion when frame rates skipped and this helped a bit. It was a long time ago so I might be misremembering things though.