Alright so I have Fedora KDE on two different laptops. Both are running pipewire and I’m managing sample rate/buffer with Cable. My old Dell works seamlessly but my last gen ThinkPad is having an issue where incoming audio is incredibly distorted and pitched down. All VSTs playback that way as does audio from YouTube. Anybody come across any issue like this and have a solution?
Also wanted to add both laptops are running on Fedora 43
Welcome to Elektronauts, @818GABBERZ!
It seems like your issue has been reported a few times for different devices but the underlying problem is the same.
Take a look at [SOLVED] Analog Heat +FX Class Compliant mode for the solution.
Install pwvucontrol and check which profile is selected.
Also, use tuned-adm to set your power profile to throughput or even realtime, if you can.
Neither helped sadly. I’ll have to set up a realtime kernel and see if that helps. A lot of people said it didn’t really matter with pipewire but I can’t get audio to sound any better. Its just weird, I don’t have any of this behavior with my audio interface and both the interface and DT II work flawlessly with the other device. Hoping its not an issue with the ThinkPad on the hardware level.
The error is very likely what is explained in the thread I linked above and only affects the USB audio compliant mode. Overbridge mode is not affected by this.
The issue, has nothing to do with PipeWire or the kernel itself. It is in the USB side of the devices because it has a not fully complaint behavior. Sadly, this can only be fixed by telling the USB driver to take that into account by setting some flags and, for that, recompiling the USB drivers included in the kernel by doing what is explained in this specific comment is required.
On top of that, the weird behavior causing the distorted audio only appears with some USB hosts, which made it even more difficult to diagnose.