SPDIF Optical Keepalive with Pipewire

For years, I’ve run a set of Logitech Z-5500 speakers into an optical port on my PC. It gives good quality 5.1 audio, and supports AC3 + DTS digital passthrough as well as 44, 48, and 96khz bitrates.

The problem is, the speakers go into a ‘sleep’ mode where it takes nearly a second to bring the amp back online to play audio - so notification sounds are often not played at all.

To correct this, in the past, I’ve run a simple systemd service using sox to output a sine wave that is below the audible level like so: /usr/bin/play -q -n -c2 synth sin gain -95

Now however, we can do this directly within pipewire itself.

Firstly, we need to identify the output device using pw-top. Play some audio, and look for which sink it is being played on - eg:

S   ID  QUANT   RATE    WAIT    BUSY   W/Q   B/Q  ERR FORMAT           NAME                                                                                                                                                                   
S   28      0	   0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  Dummy-Driver
S   29      0	   0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  Freewheel-Driver
S   36      0	   0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  Midi-Bridge
S   42      0	   0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_output.usb-Kingston_HyperX_Cloud_Stinger_Core_Wireless___7.1_000000000000-00.analog-stereo
S   49      0	   0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_input.usb-Kingston_HyperX_Cloud_Stinger_Core_Wireless___7.1_000000000000-00.mono-fallback
R   40   1024  48000  32.3us   4.3us  0.00  0.00    0    S16LE 2 48000 alsa_output.usb-Generic_USB_Audio-00.HiFi_5_1__hw_Audio_3__sink
R  106   1024  48000  20.5us   5.1us  0.00  0.00    0    F32LE 2 48000  + Brave
S   50      0	   0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_output.usb-Generic_USB_Audio-00.HiFi_5_1__hw_Audio_1__sink
S   51      0	   0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_output.usb-Generic_USB_Audio-00.HiFi_5_1__hw_Audio__sink
S   52      0	   0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_input.usb-Generic_USB_Audio-00.HiFi_5_1__hw_Audio_2__source
S   53      0	   0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_input.usb-Generic_USB_Audio-00.HiFi_5_1__hw_Audio_1__source
S   54      0	   0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_output.pci-0000_2f_00.1.hdmi-stereo

In my case, the audio device is alsa_output.usb-Generic_USB_Audio-00.HiFi_5_1__hw_Audio_3__sink.

Now we create a file at ~/.config/wireplumber/main.lua.d/spdif-noise.lua with:

rule = {
  matches = {
    {
      { "node.name", "matches", "alsa_output.usb-Generic_USB_Audio-00.HiFi_5_1__hw_Audio_3__sink" }
    },
  },
  apply_properties = {
    ["dither.noise"] = 2,
    ["node.pause-on-idle"] = false,
    ["session.suspend-timeout-seconds"] = 0
  }
}

table.insert(alsa_monitor.rules,rule)

You’ll need to swap the name

Restart pipewire now: systemctl --user restart pipewire.service.

Now, when your first sound plays, pipewire will continue to output sub-audible noise to keep everything alive - which is a much better solution than using sox!