Hello, I have recently built the picard using a pi 3 model b. When I play a game on retro pie it doesn’t play any sound. I set the audio to go through the 3.5mm jack in the cmd line as well as in retropie audio settings. When I plug my headphones into the pi I hear nothing and when the aux cord connecting the pi to the speakers is disconnected the speakers emit a low hissing sound.
–Any and all help is greatly appreciated.
Make sure you have the 3.5mm jack cable going from the Picade PCB to the Pi. If you have, try swapping the positive and negative speaker wires around so the black wire goes were the red wires goes and vice versa. If that also doesn’t work try adding disable_audio_dither=1 to the boot config. If all else fails buy a shielded 3.5mm jack cable. Hope this helps.
I hate to be the one to say it, but is the volume turned up on the Pi? There’s an option for it buried somewhere in EmulationStation but I can never remember where.
Disconnecting the speakers will most likely leave them to hiss- the amp will be interpreting random environmental noise as a signal :D
I was wrong, when I tested it again I do hear sound coming from my headphones when they are plugged in. After I switched the speaker wires(recommended above) I now hear sound from the speakers when I plug the aux cord in, but then it gets quieter very quickly till its silent.
This might be a fault with the Picade PCB. Could you possibly post a photo of your board, paying particular attention to the audio input jack? Do any of the connections on the jack look lifted from the PCB at all?
I hope this picture helps, nothing on the PCB seems “lifted”. If you need another angle, please let me know.
Hi Mingee23,
Were you able to get this resolved? I’m having a very similar problem and I’m trying to figure out if your issue was resolved.
In my case, audio works if I plug in separate headphones, and the speakers themselves work if I plug them into another device (my 3DS), however when plugged into the Raspberry Pi, no sound at all.
Hopeful your situation was resolved and might be helpful to my own.
NightOwl
there are several possible causes. I would suggest you try flashing the firmware that does away with headphone detection. To do so, run:
curl https://get.pimoroni.com/picadefw | bash
choose option 1 (no headphone detection)
This did the trick, thank you for your response and assistance, it is greatly appreciated!
I’ve just set up my Picade console but am getting no sound after installing the Picade Hat drivers. Sound is output over the HDMI before Picade Hat driver install but not afterwards. I’ve tried the things in this threat but none have worked so far.
I’ve also noticed that the System Volume is being reset to 0% everytime I launch a game. I’ve also tried setting the sound to come from the HDMI in EmulationStation too.
Hi Scott,
If you’ve got a new Picade console it will have an X HAT rather than the board which is shown & discussed in the above thread. Assuming you have a new system…
To make sure I understand, you’re not getting sound from the speaker inside the console after installing the Picade X Hat driver? If that’s the case, the first thing is to check the speaker wiring. Make sure that the wires are inserted into the connector on the X HAT securely, and the right way round.
I think the system volume resetting to 0% is normal when you have Emulation Station’s AUDIO DEVICE option set to anything other than PCM. That’s what happens on my system anyway - I select a different device, go out of the sound menu and back in, the volume is 0%. The PCM device is the only one that keeps the volume setting.
I think the X HAT software disables the Pi’s onboard audio i.e. the audio jack and audio via HDMI. You can tweak the boot/config.txt to try and turn this back on, but the Picade software also installs a sound sound config file which may stop that working.
Thanks for your reply!
Yes, I do have a new system with the X HAT. Upon further inspection I found that the ground wire wasn’t connected at the speaker end. I’ve soldered it back on (yet to try it out but I’m assuming that was the problem).
Also found this thread that shows what to edit to get the sound out via the HDMI.
5 years later and I am getting the same symptoms ( it is the old model that I have, it’s been in my garage for aeons) :-)
The firmware links is 404ing (understandably) - is there anywhere that I could get this firmware update from please?
Thanks!
Sean
In case anyone else treads this path, the firmware is here and it solved my issue :-)