Today is National Grouch Day (no foolin’) and in the past, I’ve had a list of ways to participate, to which I will refer you since I’m almost certain that you haven’t yet tried them all, and coming up with new ideas that are not variations of the same things is a great way to get me irritable – yes, that fits the bill, but then you don’t get to participate too, and merely observing the holiday in others is exceptionally poor spirit.
However, I have found that, inadvertently, I have stumbled upon the ways to celebrate it anyway. The first was, to simply suggest to The Manatee that he download GIMP to do some simple edits on images, which then led him to a long and frustrating process in attempting to find a version compatible with his mAcoS version, or alternately to see what it would take to upgrade his version – like me, he does not pursue the upgrade schedule that manufacturers suggest (read: try to force upon users) and ran afoul of GIMP no longer listing old enough versions through normal channels. All to just rescale (and maybe crop) some photos that I could’ve/should’ve done anyway.
Meanwhile, I celebrated it personally by once again tackling an issue that’s been bugging me – granted, this was ahead of schedule and not today, but it’s the frustration that counts, right? That saga, already in draft form this morning, lies below:
I have a semi-custom computer, a ‘mini-tower’ except it’s not all that mini, which has all of the extras that I use regularly: multiple hard drives for backups and countless projects, memory card reader, programmed gaming mouse with custom functions, and so on. And one of the things that’s been bugging me, for a long time now, has been the external speakers.
I don’t use them that often (mostly headphones,) but there are times when it’s seriously handy to have them. And at some point after switching over to Ubuntu Studio as my operating system, I realized that the left speaker wasn’t functioning. And this began a seriously long saga that I’m now going to relate as a lesson.
The first thing was, the headphones worked fine on both channels/ears, so it wasn’t a mono/stereo setting. And I bumped out the plug part way from the back of the unit and got sound from the left speaker. So far so good. Then I started playing.
I went into everything about Ubuntu and sound management that I could, and nothing fixed it. I tried switching speaker sets, and got the same result. I ordered another sound card (since I’d been using the onboard, built-in one) and tried that out. Same result. Had to be something in the sound drivers.
Now, Linux and Ubuntu are notoriously bad about handling sound, for unknown reasons, and still have a legacy sound handler called Pulseaudio that is widely recognized as shit – why Ubuntu Studio (which is specifically aimed towards music, video, and image editing) installed this damn thing, I’ll never know. The replacement for this software package is Pipewire, and I’d installed it, but never got it operational. Still, I had to suspect that Pulseaudio was doing something that it shouldn’t.
So I spent a couple of days (off and on, of course) trying to get Pipewire properly installed and operational, with conflicting instructions available. Several times when I thought I had it, I ran a check and Pulseaudio was still the default sound program. After much fucking around, I finally got Pipewire working and Pulseaudio off.
And yet, still no left speaker. So I disconnected the speaker set and connected them instead to another computer, and lo and behold, the left speaker failed there too. Now, bear in mind that, right near the very start of all this playing around, I’d backed the plug out and gotten the left speaker working, albeit from the right channel, but working. Fine, okay, pulled out the original speaker set and tested those on the other computer. They worked fine in both channels.
Plugged those back into my computer, and no left channel. Somewhere in the past, I’d removed the new sound card since it hadn’t seemed to be the solution, and two sound cards was confusing Ubuntu (especially since the headphones were going through the front port, so the onboard card.) Nonetheless, I dug it back out, installed it, and disabled the onboard sound card. And now both channels were working fine!
The lesson here is that, after finding the first speaker set worked if I backed the plug out, I switched them with another set, without running full diagnostics in order. Both the left speaker connection on the onboard sound card and the left channel on the second set of speakers were bad – I just dodged the step that would have revealed this by swapping things at the wrong times.
The takeaway: Do things one step at a time, in order, repetitively if necessary, to be sure of your diagnosis. In part, I swapped speakers at the wrong time (a working set for a non-working set,) and in part, I wasn’t thinking of the coincidence of both the sound card port and one of the speaker sets having the exact same failure point.
Now, in doing this, the headphone port on the front stopped making good contact, after much fussing a few months back to replace it too, so now more replacement parts are on order. Worse, that front panel comes from the onboard sound card, and I think it has to since it’s custom-wired and all that shit. I have had extremely bad luck with the onboard cards on this motherboard (the video, the network, and now the sound card have all been bypassed by using PCI cards because they’ve all been undependable.) So I’m not thrilled about having to re-enable it to have working headphones. I’ll be looking into avoiding this somehow – unfortunately, the speaker set that I’m using, while featuring a desktop power switch and volume control, does not have a headphone port built into it like some.
But some better news: Curious about just where the second speaker set was dropping out the left channel/speaker, I popped it open and did some basic diagnostics, in meticulous order this time. The desktop left and right speakers plug into the main, ‘woofer’ portion that sits under the desk, via a standard 3.5mm stereo plug, so that’s where I started. Doing the same ‘backing out’ trick I did indeed get detailed sound from the left speaker, so the speaker itself wasn’t blown, but this could mean either the connection or the sound itself (since backing it out only forces it to contact the right speaker connection instead, and had that side gone bad, it would have been even harder to diagnose); the latter would be a component issue and likely not fixable with my current knowledge. So I checked the continuity on the socket itself on the back of the woofer unit, and it all seemed fine. Then I split open the plug on the desktop speakers, which in typical manner had been assembled and then the rubber shielding actually cast over the whole thing, meaning it had to be cut away. but I have several replacement parts of this type already – mostly, what I needed to know was which color wire went to which terminal on the replacement plug, which simply cutting the wires wouldn’t tell me. Once determined, I soldered the wires to the replacement plug and bam!, all speakers working correctly now.
This unit has a headphone port right on the remote power/volume switch that extends to the desktop, but The Girlfriend wanted them so she wouldn’t have to keep plugging and unplugging her headphones into her own mini-tower, and I don’t blame her because the manufacturer of that one thought the case looked sleeker by making the port almost impossible to see, because the looks of a computer are far more important than the mere functionality of it (something that Apple embraced enthusiastically.) So I still have to re-solder a new headphone socket into my own mini-tower, when it arrives (I’ve got five on order, partially in case of another failure, mostly because it was cheap enough to up the number.) If you ask me nicely enough, I’ll be back to relate how that went!
TL;DR: No way. It’s National Grouch Day – go back and read that all from the beginning, you slack-ass.