I’m a long time Kodi user and my most recent iteration is via LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 3.
It’s been running fine for several weeks, but has recently started to have some strange audio related issues and I’m calling into question whether or not my audio settings are correct. I have the output device set to HDMI, number of channels = 5.1, stereo upmix = disabled, passthrough = enabled. Playing content which reports 5.1 sound, shows through my amp (a Sony soundbar) as 5.1, 2 channels show as 2.0, etc.
A couple of weeks ago, I disconnected the USB drive connected to the Pi which stores some of my content and as I did this, I dropped it about 3 inches. I mention this because the odd behaviour I’m about to explain, began immediately afterwards (and I also had to copy 1 file over after I reconnected it, because the original seemed to have become corrupt).
So, since the above, everything with more than 2 channel audio (not just content on the drive which I ‘dropped’ (which only stores files, as the Pi boots from an SD card)) reported 7.1 channels via my amp’s info display, and voices were playing extremely muffled, as if they were playing on an audio channel which didn’t exist. In order to get back to some level or normality (2 channel content showing as 2.0, 5.1 showing as 5.1, etc), I had to change the NUMBER OF CHANNELS in the audio settings to 4.1…anything above this resulted in the symptoms I’ve just described. Some content with 5.1 audio still shows on my amp’s screen as being 7.1 but now sound ‘normal’ (i.e. without the muffled voices).
Does this correlate with anything that anybody’s come across before? Should my NUMBER OF CHANNELS setting be the number of channels which the audio device can handle? I’m stumped as to how this could have happened without me actually changing any of the audio settings. Thanks in advance for your help/suggestions.