Issue with Bang & Olufsen speakers

I

i cannot be helped

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I'm trying to get sound working on my Arch Anywhere-installed OS (I don't suspect that I can go to the official forums because I've used the script); the sound from the B&O speakers on my 64-bit HP Pavilion is terrible and I suspect that the cause is driver-related given that pulseeffects cannot correct it; the subwoofer appears to be off. I have installed alsa-firmware and I have tried to use hda-jack-retask too using VLC to test audio, restarting pulseaudio very every test.

lspci -vv | grep audio yields:

Code: 
Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel

/proc/asound/cards tells me:

Code: 
0 [HDMI]: HDA-Intel - HDA ATI HDMI
HDA ATI HDMI at 0xfeb64000 irq 41
1 [Generic]: HDA-Intel - HD-Audio Generic
HD-Audio Generic at 0xfeb60000 irq 40
 


Welcome to the forums, and sorry you haven't received any response sooner. I doubt that I can help much myself as I am unfamiliar with Arch, but I will try to help Google around to see if something comes up.

I am also unfamiliar with that brand of speakers.... are they made for a computer? I found the company online and everything looks like home entertainment products. Are you trying to use them wireless or by cable? Have you ever had them working before... on a computer?

You have me confused about ndiswrapper... it is typically used for wifi connectivity. What Windows drivers are you trying to load with ndiswrapper? For sound or wifi?

Have you tried other speaker sets and find if they work, or not? Your code responses seem like Arch is properly configured for sound.

Cheers
 
atanere said:
Welcome to the forums, and sorry you haven't received any response sooner. I doubt that I can help much myself as I am unfamiliar with Arch, but I will try to help Google around to see if something comes up.

I am also unfamiliar with that brand of speakers.... are they made for a computer? I found the company online and everything looks like home entertainment products. Are you trying to use them wireless or by cable? Have you ever had them working before... on a computer?

You have me confused about ndiswrapper... it is typically used for wifi connectivity. What Windows drivers are you trying to load with ndiswrapper? For sound or wifi?

Have you tried other speaker sets and find if they work, or not? Your code responses seem like Arch is properly configured for sound.

Cheers
Click to expand...

The speakers are embedded in my laptop and I have no other speakers to hand (though I can use my other laptop to do sound-related things given that it works fine there). I had found some drivers but I don't know where to find them since I reinstalled Arch due to some error or another and my immediate history wasn't saved. I've also tried to compile the Realtek Linux driver for HDA but it fails due to implicit variable declarations; there must be a prerequisite which isn't detalied in the configure file.
 
Rob said:
Ok, i'll do some googling etc as well and see if we can find something.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't count on it; I've done a lot myself. See what you can find if you've got some tricks that I haven't; I don't have many.
 
RE: Drivers...
Can you post some of the error messages that are causing the build to fail?
 
JasKinasis said:
RE: Drivers...
Can you post some of the error messages that are causing the build to fail?
Click to expand...

I'm using the Linux 3.0 driver from here. For extra convenience, I've got the relevant output of lspci -vv.

After I fix permissions errors with the files when compiling it, I get this error:

Code: 
/home/idiot/Downloads/audiodrivertake2/alsa-driver-RTv5.18/alsa/acore/info.c:1065:22: error: macro "__DATE__" might prevent reproducible builds [-Werror=date-time]
       "Compiled on " __DATE__ " for kernel %s"
                      ^~~~~~~~
cc1: some warnings being treated as errors
make[3]: *** [scripts/Makefile.build:295: /home/idiot/Downloads/audiodrivertake2/alsa-driver-RTv5.18/alsa/acore/info.o] Error 1
make[2]: *** [scripts/Makefile.build:553: /home/idiot/Downloads/audiodrivertake2/alsa-driver-RTv5.18/alsa/acore] Error 2
make[1]: *** [Makefile:1492: _module_/home/idiot/Downloads/audiodrivertake2/alsa-driver-RTv5.18/alsa] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/lib/modules/4.11.3-1-ARCH/build'
make: *** [Makefile:167: compile] Error 2

When I replace that, I get this when I run make again:

Code: 
/home/idiot/Downloads/audiodrivertake2/alsa-driver-RTv5.18/alsa/acore/control.c: In function ‘snd_ctl_read’:

/home/idiot/Downloads/audiodrivertake2/alsa-driver-RTv5.18/alsa/acore/control.c:1456:8: error: implicit declaration of function ‘signal_pending’; did you mean ‘timer_pending’? [-Werror=implicit-function-declaration]
    if (signal_pending(current))
        ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
        timer_pending
cc1: some warnings being treated as errors
make[3]: *** [scripts/Makefile.build:295: /home/idiot/Downloads/audiodrivertake2/alsa-driver-RTv5.18/alsa/acore/control.o] Error 1
make[2]: *** [scripts/Makefile.build:553: /home/idiot/Downloads/audiodrivertake2/alsa-driver-RTv5.18/alsa/acore] Error 2
make[1]: *** [Makefile:1492: _module_/home/idiot/Downloads/audiodrivertake2/alsa-driver-RTv5.18/alsa] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/lib/modules/4.11.3-1-ARCH/build'
make: *** [Makefile:167: compile] Error 2
 
[EDIT]
I have removed my previous suggestions as they have not worked.
[/EDIT]

This has piqued my interest.
I've grabbed a copy of the source-code and am currently trying to get it to build successfully.

If I have any luck - I will either walk you through the process, or provide some patches - if patching is more appropriate.
 
Last edited:
I'm still poking around the web too, as time allows. Sound can be a real pain to solve sometimes. A couple of questions:

1. Have you (or can you) test your headphone jack with either headphones or speakers? I've read some things that indicate it might work okay even though the speakers do not.

2. What has led you to attempting to use a Realtek driver? I didn't see anything in lspci or your pastebin that referenced Realtek. (I apologize if I missed it.)
 
Hmm.... Okay.
After reading through the documentation that comes with the source code for the driver - it says in there that it is tested on kernels from v3.0 to v3.2. And from your output, I can see that you are running v4.11 of the kernel. I'm running 4.9 on Debian testing. So we are running kernels that are several releases ahead of the driver.

After making several attempts to build the driver - it seems that a lot of the implicit include warnings are from calls to functions that are no longer in the kernel headers. So I don't think this driver will actually build as it currently stands - it would take a lot of modification as you would have to look up each of the missing functions and try to determine when they were removed from the kernel and the appropriate functionality to be calling instead.

Otherwise, your only other option would be to install a 3.2.x Linux kernel and build and run the driver under that? Could come with it's own set of problems!

That said, looking at some of the other documentation - there are a few git repositories mentioned.... So perhaps a more up-to-date, compatible version of the driver can be pulled/cloned from their git repos......
 
Last edited:
atanere said:
I'm still poking around the web too, as time allows. Sound can be a real pain to solve sometimes. A couple of questions:

1. Have you (or can you) test your headphone jack with either headphones or speakers? I've read some things that indicate it might work okay even though the speakers do not.

2. What has led you to attempting to use a Realtek driver? I didn't see anything in lspci or your pastebin that referenced Realtek. (I apologize if I missed it.)
Click to expand...

Wow, thanks for putting me on the right track. I was misled by the HDA remapper when it told me about Realtek; I've already found a relevant article but I don't know where to find the relevant config files. My GPU is a Radeon. Regarding what @JasKinasis says, I'll scale back my search for now.
 
Don't thank me yet! :confused: I'm still unsure of the "right track," and it may still lead back to RealTek. So keep up your search as well, and maybe bouncing around the ideas between us (or more who may yet join in) we might hit on a solution or workaround. I don't think the Radeon GPU will relate to a sound problem, but I am not quite sure which way to go next... so let's ask a few more questions:

1. Did you have any success with the headphone jack?

2. Do you think you have alsa installed? If so, here are a couple of links with pretty extensive references that may help you... the ArchWiki for alsa and also this page.

3. How committed are you to staying with Arch? Would you experiment with other distros to see if something else might work "out-of-the-box?" Arch isn't the most friendly for those (like me!) who are not familiar with it and with the detailed fine-tuning that it often demands. In other words, I often go for the lazy fix if one is available! :D

Many of the alsa links and references I'm finding are quite old, and they may or may not be very helpful since the B&O speakers are the latest-greatest from HP (replacing Beats Audio). It can be daunting or impossible sometimes to make latest-greatest hardware work with any Linux distro as suitable drivers just may not be available yet. For what it's worth, I was just reading some complaints from Windows users also about the poor quality sound from the B&O sound system, so that might be a bad omen.
 
@atanere :

1. No success with the headphone jack; the headphones work perfectly on another device altogether.

2. The Arch wiki says that ALSA is part of GNU/Linux by default; I have firmware packages and alsa-utils installed along with PulseAudio. When I use Alsamixer, the only 'sound card' that shows up is PulseAudio. /proc/asound and /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf are both missing. /dev/snd only has two files named (./seq and ./timer).

3. I'm very committed unless I can find something which updates faster and has similar numbers of packages available.

Always nice to know that it's not just fellow AMD Linux users and I who have to suffer but the unconverted too. So far I haven't found any drivers which work.
 
Okay, so I found out what lsmod is and does. I have an older version of AMDGPU installed (I suspect that it comes with the sound drivers like Catalyst does) according to some piped output.

When I tried to install a new one from the AUR, I got this error:

Code: 
Failed to prepare transaction:
could not satisfy dependencies:
lib32-libglvnd: removing libglvnd breaks dependency 'libglvnd'
mesa: removing libglvnd breaks dependency 'libglvnd'
 
The AMD graphics drivers should not have any affect on the internal sound card. From your first post the audio card is supported by intel audio. Digging through the thread a little, I noticed you tried building a driver for the 3.0 kernel. Assuming you are, in fact, using Arch generic then the 3.0 kernel drivers will not work. Arch has not been on the 3.0 kernel for some time and drivers for older kernels usually do not work on newer kernels. I would suggest using a pure installation not from a script.

Concerning AMD GPU drivers in general, on ARCH the only officially supported drivers are the opensource drivers. Please refer to this page for installation instructions: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMDGPU
 
Adding a bit more context, back when I was using an HP laptop with Beats audio, the chipset was actually by intel. Digging a little bit seems to show the same is true for B&O. So the driver will be from Intel (aka intel-snd). Please ensure you are on an up-to-date Arch system as well.
 
I tend to think that a speaker is a speaker... that there may be little or no difference between B&O and the Beats Audio that HP supplied earlier. The trouble is the "sound device"... at its basic form just a chip on the motherboard (needing a driver and/or configuration). And it may be that "device" has not changed much in the last few years, even with the change in speaker brands. (Of course, I could be wrong too!)

But with that in mind, since I'm not finding much else to go with, let me point to a couple of Ubuntu articles concerning Beats Audio and alsa configurations. I don't know if the hda-jack-retask app is available in the AUR, but it looks like the source (by David Henningsson) is available in links on these pages.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/302340/is-there-a-way-to-enable-beats-audio-from-within-linux

https://askubuntu.com/questions/396...vers-for-beats-audio-speakers-for-hp-envy-dv6

Also this, from the above link:
https://www.smittix.co.uk/beats-audio-subwoofer-not-working-correctly-ubuntu-14-04/
 
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