LinuxMusicians

On my MSI Creator TRX40 motherboard are two audio chips. I'm using Devuan Linux Chimaera (based on Debian).

According to https://www.anandtech.com/show/15121/th ... -overview- scroll down to "AMD TRX40 And The Realtek ALC4050HD Audio Codec" ALC4050 is the USB front end for the ALC1220. ALC1220VBDT is what ALSA finds, but the ALC4050 chip is also being used for some of the sockets. So the various audio sockets on the motherboard rear edge and the front panel sockets on the case are driven by these chips.

Doesn't matter what I do, the outputs sound crap. On the rear line out I get a few seconds of sounding OK, then a really loud harsh noise, which then reduces to loud crackles often. On the front headphone out, not so loud crackles often.

So I'm using two USB devices. One is for ALSA stuff, the other I use for JACK.

Would be good to use the motherboard audio chips for music production with JACK. Anyone know how to make these behave? Or do I just have broken ones?

Alternatively I could get a PCIe 4.0 sound card. Any recommendations?

I'd say something is broken. You've checked the cables?

Exactly the same audio cables / speakers / headphones I use for the two USB devices, where things work fine.

Looking at the link you posted this seems relevant :

AMD wrote:

The TRX40 platform does not support the HD audio interface used on most desktop and mobile processors.

The usual kernel module for motherboard sound is called something like 'HDA Intel'. That's not going to work on a TRX40. The two chips setup is not particularly well explained on Anandtech. I doubt the reviewers understand exactly what is going on. For Linux I think a different kernel module, maybe two, will be required.

A PCIe 4.0 soundcard, eh? Audio isn't much of a challenge for a modern computer, bandwidth wise. There aren't a lot of PCIe soundcards around. The ones that are around are PCIe x1. In other words they use one PCIe lane, and that's plenty. Whether it's gen 3 or 4 isn't a factor for audio.

It's using the USB audio driver, not HDA Intel. HDA Intel is being used on my system, for the HDMI sound on the graphics card, the rest are USB.

I'm not seeing any kernel modules specific to these chips, or any RealTek ones for audio. Plenty of RealTek modules for Bluetooth and Wifi.

I'm just gonna give up entirely on these two motherboard audio chips. I figured out they are also responsible for the every 5 seconds for days on end kernel and JACK errors, when being used or not. Those errors go away if I disable them.

Meh, I didn't buy this motherboard for it's audio.

I got two external USB sound devices that work fine. Don't really need anything more, though I would still like to get a decent internal card.