Delayed, choppy HDMI audio issue on Ubuntu 23.10

Question

This may be more than one issue; upon starting a YouTube video or a video file in VLC, the audio is silent for about 2 seconds before playing. Same delay problem happens when playing audio in Spotify and other programs.

Then, during video playback, it will play normally for 5 to 10 minutes, sometimes longer, but inevitably the audio will drop out for about a second, and repeatedly drop out a couple times, before resuming normally.

I've read a solution that suggest changing the pulseaudio config file from

## Automatically suspend sinks/sources that become idle for too long
# load-module module-suspend-on-idle

To

## Automatically suspend sinks/sources that become idle for too long
 load-module module-suspend-on-idle

However, I cannot seem to find these lines in the pulseaudio config file

I have no other issues with video playback. It is present regardless of whether the display refresh rate is 60hz or 59.94hz. I'm struggling to diagnose this issue.

Output of aplay -l:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC1150 Analog [ALC1150 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: ALC1150 Digital [ALC1150 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [AV Receiver]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 10: HDMI 4 [HDMI 4]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 11: HDMI 5 [HDMI 5]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

pactl list outputs:

Command 'pactl' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install pulseaudio-utils

pulseaudio -k outputs:

Command 'pulseaudio' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install pulseaudio

alsainfo.sh --no-upload outputs:

alsa-info.sh: command not found

lspci -nn | grep '[04[80][13]]' outputs:

00:01.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 6th-10th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16) [8086:1901] (rev 07)
00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 100 Series/C230 Series Chipset Family USB 3.0 xHCI Controller [8086:a12f] (rev 31)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation Z170 Chipset LPC/eSPI Controller [8086:a145] (rev 31)
00:1f.3 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 100 Series/C230 Series Chipset Family HD Audio Controller [8086:a170] (rev 31)
03:00.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Navi 10 HDMI Audio [1002:ab38]
05:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6315 Series Firewire Controller [1106:3403] (rev 01)
0a:00.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation DSL6540 USB 3.1 Controller [Alpine Ridge] [8086:15b6]

Dominic Trinajstic · Answer 1 · 2023-11-14T04:40:03.833

The following answer has solved the delayed start-of-audio issue, but not the sporadic audio drop during playback. Thanks to user hananamar: https://askubuntu.com/a/1438571/721075

the audio software is now pipewire, and no longer pulseaudio. So @user1115995's solution of disabling the suspend feature on pulseaudio, can be done for pipewire with these commands: (source)
sudo sed -i 's/--\["session.suspend-timeout-seconds"\] = 5/\["session.suspend-timeout-seconds"\] = 0/'/usr/share/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua
systemctl restart --user pipewire.service

Delayed, choppy HDMI audio issue on Ubuntu 23.10

1 Answers1