Disable HDMI Audio

Hey guys, I ran into another issue today that took me a few hours of troubleshooting before I came to a solution. I thought I'd share it with you guys today.

So after updating to 14.2 (64), I discovered that my default audio device was set to Nvidia HDMI. This is not what I want. I actually have a Sabretech 7.1 USB sound card, which I use to connect to my receiver via S/PDIF.

Sound was working correctly in Deadbeef (where you can manually set your soundcard in the application preferences), however that was the only application working as expected.

First, I went to the wiki and followed the instructions in the following article,"Sound problems in Sackware." As mentioned in the article, I added the following options in /etc/asound.conf:

# ALSA system-wide config file
# By default, redirect to PulseAudio:
#pcm.default pulse
#ctl.default pulse
  pcm.!default {
    type hw
    card 1
    device 0
    }
  ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card 1
    }

Note: the first two lines redirecting to pulse were already there. I decided to comment them out, since I don't want to use pulse audio.

This corresponds to my USB soundcard--card1, device 0. However, this did not result in any change. I added the same options to ~/.asound.rc in my users home directory. This did not result in any changes either.

Finally I stumbled up the following blog post. This basically explains that the Nvidia sound module depends on an Intel module being loaded--specifically, snd_hda_intel.

Upon checking lsmod, I confirmed that the snd_hda_intel module was indeed being loaded. I added an entry in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf to blacklist the module:

blacklist snd_hda_intel

Finally after rebooting, my sound was working as expected!