tldr;
cat /usr/local/bin/fix-riser-chop.sh

#!/bin/bash
sleep 1

CARD=“card1”
PM_PATH=“/sys/class/drm/$CARD/device”

1. Force Manual Mode

echo “manual” > “$PM_PATH/power_dpm_force_performance_level”

2. Toggle to VIDEO (3)

echo “3” > “$PM_PATH/pp_power_profile_mode”

sleep 2

3. Toggle to COMPUTE (5)

echo “5” > “$PM_PATH/pp_power_profile_mode”

4. Force Clock

echo “5” > “$PM_PATH/pp_dpm_mclk”

Exec=bash -c “sudo /usr/local/bin/fix-riser-chop.sh; youtube-music %U”

I also had to make it so that my user could run this script using sudo with nopasswd if I remember correctly.

Finally figured out something that had been causing basically my only issues I have since installing CachyOS for my living room gaming computer.

My GPU is a 6070 XT and has been doing really well running 4K on the games I have tried so far. There were also no audio issues with Games, so I was surprised when I tried streaming music in the browser and was getting choppy / pausing audio and occasional crackling.

To preface this, I was determined to fix it because I had the audio working in Windows before on the exact same rig, other than the fact that I had plugged a USB into the machine and axed Windows, replacing it with CachyOS.

I spent quite a bit of time using LLM to help me understand the audio platform I was working with and so we tweaked quite a bit of stuff relating to quant etc after determining that the most likely reason I was getting audio issues that were not present on Windows was either due to driver differences, or Windows sort of smoothing and applying quite a bit of effects to audio, more or less masking an underlying issue with my PCIe slot the GPU is in, introduced most likely by the fact that there is a riser needed for the Fractal Design Ridge case.

Tweaking Audio Settings did make differences that I could hear in the frequency of the issues, etc, but couldn’t totally alleviate the issue.

Eventually I realized that if I started a video in another window while the music played, the issue would disappear, similar to how the issue was not present when gaming it was also not present with video playing, whether or not the audio was from the video.

This led us to the conclusion that the driver probably was changing memclock on the GPU to a higher level when video / games or other load bearing activities started(I was able to confirm this with commands), and would keep the memclock steady instead of fluctuating, so we tested this and eventually also tested tweaking the power profile. I am not 100% sure that it is actually needed, at this point, to tweak the memclock, but I liked the result of doing them in tandem better.

So, now that we had solved it we decided to make a script that would run as a service when the computer started that would sleep, then adjust the memclock and gpu powerprofile.

Unfortunately, this didn’t work, but if I ran the same commands, it would work every time, as long as I was toggling the power profile to a different one. (4 and 5 worked the best for me, but I think 3 might be good enough too).

At the end of the day, I ended up modifying the app launcher for youtube-music to run a script when it starts that would sleep for 1 second, set pp to 3, then sleep for 2 seconds and set pp to 5, and also set the gpumemclprofile to 5

As crazy as that sounds that is how I had to fix it. Still not sure if the issue overall is introduced by my riser card or just a problem with AMDs HDMI audio drivers on linux.

Yes, I checked the soundbar for optic ports etc and couldn’t find any. I also haven’t gotten my onboard Bluetooth to work yet, which would be a possibility for the soundbar.