Volume not balanced across devices

Product support
,
1

Hi there :wave:

I started using balena sounds recently I very much like the approach of managing a fleet via the balena dashboard!

However, after setting up my fleet I ran into an issue where the volume across my two devices is largely imbalanced. Even when I set the volume (using the SOUND_VOLUME env var) of device A to 1 and the volume for device B to 100, still the volume of device A is way too loud and device B is barley audible. That is why I assume there is something fishy, or I am doing something wrong. When I run the devices as standalone devices I am able tune the volume of the devices properly, which means the speaker+dac combination works in general. Any hint would be appreciated.

My setup looks as follows:

device balenaOS balena sound release DAC SOUND_VOLUME problem
Raspberry Pi 3b+ 64bit 2.80.3+rev1 df4c8eb HifiBerry Amp2 1 too loud
Raspberry Pi 4b 64bit 2.88.5+rev1 df4c8eb HifiBerry Mini Amp 100 too quite

Note, I also tried different combinations of the SOUND_MODE env var, unfortunately without any success.

2

Seems like I found a work-around:

  1. open terminal on the audio service via the Balena Dashboard
  2. issue the alsamixer command
  3. press F6
  4. chose dac
  5. skip to the right ~7 times until “Digital”
  6. turn volume lower with key-down

Since this only fixes the issue temporarily and does not survive a reboot I am still interested in a proper fix to this. Or is there a way to somehow configure the alsamixer settings permanently?

3

Have you had a chance to take a look at the following threads? They might have some helpful information on managing the sound for your device.