@rbaker Breadboarded the circuit. The only problem was the 10uF cap to boost the gain to 200x, as you can see in the pic, I have its lead pulled. High distortion with that in place and no appreciable gain in volume. The 20x native to the LM386 gives the same volume as a GBA (seen here running Advance Wars from my prototype controller mounted build) running from a 6v supply. The audio quality is about the same as a GBA as well. Nothing incredible, but adequate and I should be able to cram a couple of these in that casing without a problem.

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@Tackskull I know this is an old topic, but I've just installed a new Retropie setup on new hardware on Ubuntu 22.04 and had this exact problem which I've never had before. It was driving me mad, but your solution instantly fixed the issue.

@rc_cola
Once when I experienced problems with cd tracks on psx games, I experimented with different audio drivers. If you dig more and search the web, you will find some different opinions. I think one of the audio driver will synchronize with video and if you get frame drops or anything else can't keep it up, then audio starts to stutter. Changing the driver did resolve this problem, if i remember right. The audio wasn't no longer synchronized, but it sounded without problems and I couldn't tell anything wrong with it. It was only happening with cd tracks. So, in short, this could be one of the tradeoffs. I have no more details about this, sorry.

Btw, you may find more information if you search about these topics in generell, like sdl vs alsa. These are common in Linux. And just in case you missed this page:
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Sound-Issues/ Note, they speak about older Raspberry Pi versions on this page.

I have installed the Kubuntu again on my pc and installed again retropie. The sound was good without any problem, but now this issue came back again. Is it probably because I've tried to install again the ps2 emulator that is asking me something about sdl12? Ps2 emulator failed to install anyway, but how can I get the basics settings back?

@blackhat1

We need more information on your setup. The required information is outlined at https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

@mth75 Yeah i managed to figure it out, my configs/all/retroarch.cfg global override was doing something, so i deleted retroarch.cfg in config/atari5200/ and it reset it and save directory override and all good got sound now

Hello mitu,

thanks for your reply. I looked a the games.log file. no details of the crash.
I also tried the "set cvars" in the ingame control panel etc, still crashed.

not sure where to go from here.

@mitu Thanks for the addition, I forgot to mention that.

@Addison As mitu said, my tip doesn't apply to HDMI, sorry.

I ended up just going back to the 3.5mm jack for audio in my cabinet. Based on the linked article, I just made sure I had the following settings in my config.txt:

disable_audio_dither=1
audio_pwm_mode=2

For some reason my pwm_mode was set to 0 in my config and changing that to 2 resolved all my issues with the 3.5mm jack.

Unfortunately, I was never able to get the crackle / hiss / static noise issue resolved when sending audio out HDMI to my HDMI to VGA adapter.

Whoever could solve the problem with sound on SNES emulator PI3B, PI3B+
The solutions described "https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Sound-Issues/" do not work.
Very disappointed in Raspberry.
Sound sometimes slows down and collapses.

a few days later .... after reading a lot of unnecessary information
The problem was in throttling.

avoid_warnings=2 means don't show the warning squares and don't disable turbo mode on under-voltage condition. We still throttle on over-temperature.

@mitu Thank you very much! Just needed a good noob starting point, much appreciated.

You can always bypass software and just splice together a cable that combines the stereo audio channels into one output. Just strip the left and right channel wires, wire the grounds together, solder a 1kΩ resistor to the end of each audio channel and combine them together to get a solid mono output from a stereo source.

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@dankcushions said in Garbled Audio when crt shaders enabled:

the ‘new style’ xmb menu is not enabled in retropie by default. we use the old green menu for these kind of reasons. i guess your configs are all messed up and it’s using default retroarch settings, so all bets are off.

Yep. I got it fixed now. Not even sure how exactly but I noticed that my nes and gb system cfg files had a ton of stuff in there copied from the default retroarch. I just rebuilt them by hand and all is well now.

@alturis oh wow. I didn't even notice that. good catch.