Windows 10 Audio issues

User Support
1

Hi Everyone, and happy Monday to you!

I’m working now to resolve an issue in a Windows 10 HVM. The issues are as follows:

  • Scratchy popping audio output, when using the native Qubes sound. Very light but noticed…
  • When using a hyper-x headset w/mic, drop out in audio heard and spoken is experienced

I’m looking at perhaps xen drivers for windows, but not sure if they are needed. I’m aware of the absence of a QWT package at this time, however I’m interested in what people are working with and where to obtain it and install.

Let me know what you think! I appreciate the help and have a great day!

Klaus

2

Please refer to this post from yesterday:

If you do not want to wait for the signed builds and want them for testing purpose, you could download the nightly build artifacts (the one which was linked at the end of the above thread). Or from Gitlab from 1 hour ago:

Unsigned nightly builds require Windows Testing Mode.

3

So, here is what I’ve done to test this:

I am experiencing the following:

  • a little crackling in the audio playback running a youtube video howto with lots of speech for test and being output through Qubes audio sink (HD audio Device in Windows)
  • a LOT of drop out in audio playback and recording via the USB Hyper-X headset device

All in all, I was able to replicate the problem but at this point don’t know how to proceed in fixing - only know how I would work around it. Any next steps appreciated!

Thanks,

Klaus

4

One recommendation I could make is to visit the audio-model feature in qvm-features manual. What is the current one for the tested Windows 10 VM?

5

Does this have an impact on a Hyper-X headphones? Its a USB sound card driven design. The priority here would be the usb headphones over the emulated audio card.

However I did take the time to spin up a Win 10 qube that did not have the QWT software installed. Setting the audio model to ich6 allowed the qubes emulated audio to work with no effort - else, its no device found for audio. Unfortunately I can say that it still had the same kind of noise noted above which you can hear watching a conversational video :frowning:

6

Now it makes sense. If it is USB sound card, there are three individual methods to attach it to Windows VM (or any HVM).

  1. Via USB passthrough
  2. Via PCI passthrough of the entire USB controller which the headphone is attached to.
  3. Audio passthrough via sys-audio (if you have enabled and setup a sys-audio ServiceVM)

To clarify, which method you are currently using?

7

I believe it to be a USB passthrough. Its initiated via the Qubes Devices drop down. I could plugin a card for USB and then do PCI passthrough with that. Would that be worth a try?

8

Yes. If you can do it, it would most probably solve the entire issue. The disadvantage would be that you will have to manually disconnect the Headphone from that card and connect it to the card connected to sys-usb if you want to use it in other qubes.

9

Dug up an 3.0 USB card, dealt with the shift in PCI assignments that hit my sys-net qube, and now I’m getting an error upon starting the Win10 qube: Unknown PCI header type ‘127’.

I’m now researching this error in the forums for more info, but if you’ve seen this let me know :wink:

10

So I wasn’t able to resolve the issue of the USB hub card with “unknown PCI header type 127” issue, tried various things to no avail. I thought however to swap it out with another to pray for resolution hehe.

I had a Startech 4 port with ASMedia ASM3142 host controller chipset in a server I swapped with.
With this card no more header issue preventing boot of the qube, plus testing both playback and record using the HyperX headset worked without a flaw detected! It looks like having a device directly conntected to the Windows 10 qube did the trick, and problem solved as far as I’m concerned. Thanks for your help @alimirjamali and have good evening :wink:

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