Analog Audio on Pi5

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1

I had already successfully realized art installations with info-beamer hosted and therefore wanted to use it for a new project as well. I bought new Pi’s and this time, of course, the new 5s. It caused me a lot of problems at my customer’s site when I wanted to connect the speakers and the analog audio port was missing…

I was able to work with HDMI audio extractors for a short time, but the experience is that these do not work reliably (CEC, EDID, …) or generate a hum. Would it also be possible to support simple USB to analog audio adapters from info-beamer? I think this could help more people replacing older PI’s with new 5s in the future. Or am I just being too stupid to get it to work?

Many thanks and best regards,
Jonas

2

I’m not entirely sure I fully understand the HDMI problem: What do you mean with CEC/EDID? Do those extractors not properly pass through those protocols from display to the Pi, so it doesn’t properly detect the display and cannot do CEC? What kind of extractor do you use? As HDMI produces a digital signal, there definitely shouldn’t be a hum, unless the extractor introduces that. Do you have the ability to try an alternative extractor?

Supporting USB devices will open up a new can of worms (like back in the day when the only info-beamer supported USB WiFi adapter for Pi1/Pi2 changed their internal chip without changing their hardware name, so newer version suddenly stopped working…), so I’m not sure about that.

3

Yes, exactly as you described. I had tried 3 cheap models from Amazon.

  • One of them apparently didn’t pass CEC/EDID, so I could only get 480p (or similar; looked like it).
  • The second one ran on 12V and its own small power supply. There I had a humming noise, which probably came from the second power supply.
  • The third one ran with USB power which I connected directly to the USB of the Raspberry. This one finally worked.

As already written, it worked in the end, but with some effort and problems. But I also completely understand your argument with the USB support. I come from the Windows world and am used to there being a suitable automatic driver for all USB audio devices :upside_down_face:

4

Thanks for the update. Glad it works. For future people having the same issue: Could you share which one worked in the end?