Hi guys,
I’ve manage to use balenasound and reproduce music on several speakers, but the jack(3.5mm) signal is really really weak and to play on my amps i have to crank the volume all the way up.
I bought a regular HDMI2AV transmiter, self powered and tried with raspbian to play sound on the transmiter. Everything went ok, the sound volume is much better that with the jack.
After this I flashed balenaSound and tried to connect the transmitter to the amp, but unfortunatle with no luck.
I spent several hours editing config variables that other people on this forum say it would solve the issue but I had no success.
I booted the pi with the cable on HDMI 0 slot but unfortunatly the sound comes ALLWAYS from the jack.
Any of you guys have been able to really force HDMI to pass the sound onto one of theese receivers?
My Setup would be just BalenaSound flashed directly onto the sd card and connected to the amp with HDMI - > HDMI2AV transmitter - > LEFT and RIGHT sound cable to AMP.
Thanks
Hi there @MistformUltimus could you clarify a few things for us:
What Pi are you using? What version of balenaSound (i.e. have you done a fresh deploy so you’re definitely on the latest version)? What settings have you changed/setup in the device configuration? What version of balenaOS is running?
For testing purposes I have just set up a brand new application and deployed the latest version on a Pi 3 (not 64 bit) and Pi 4 and have had success using HDMI audio on both devices by default without changing any of the settings. For both of my tests I had nothing plugged into the 3.5MM jack and always made sure the HDMI was connected before powering the device on.
I suspect that it’s going to be a case of playing with the configuration variables to see what works with your particular HDMI device. Everything available is mentioned here so it also depends what you’ve tried already: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/video.md
Hi Chrisys,
I am using:
- Pi 4B 2GB Ram;
- Clean install - BalenaOs 2.65.0 + rev1
I connected the pi(with balenaOS) to my TV and the balena cube is displayed but no sound is transmitted to the TV. If i plug the jack I have sound on the jack;
If I connect is raspbian OS(was de 32bit OS) i get sound out of the box.
I played with settings like:
hdmi_safe
hdmi_force_edid_audio
hdmi_drive
config_hdmi_boost
hdmi_group
hdmi_mode
but i never managed to get sound on the TV or the Amp/Speakers.
you just did a clean install, connect the HDMI to the entry0 and you got sound on your TV? Sorry for asking like this, but I have spent quite a while with this, without success.
I even tried with my mac HDMI and the sound also works on the amp…
Yep that’s right, I did a clean install just after seeing your post on a new app and new device and as long as I have the HDMI plugged in on boot I get audio - I’m testing with an LG HDMI monitor that has built in speakers. One thing I noticed though is that I accidentally used the ESR release of balenaOS rather than the latest.
That said, I tested again with the latest (2.65.0+rev1) and found it didn’t work, but on the ESR it does. The ESR version I was using is based on balenaOS 2.50.1+rev1. Could you give this version a try? You’ll need to tick ‘show outdated versions’ on the dashboard when adding a device and you’ll be able to download this version.
You made my day.
Thank you so much. With that version was just plug and play. Thank you
1 Like
Great! We will need to do some work to figure out what stopped that from working though 
Issue here: https://github.com/balena-os/balena-raspberrypi/issues/586
Hi @MistformUltimus
Just an update on this: it turns out that HDMI is working, but is no longer “enabled by default” as an audio output since kernel version 5.4, as explained in the issue linked above, as well as the more detailed explanation.
Hope this helps!
Kind regards
Alida