No audio output from 2010 Mac mini (HDMI)

Support
1

Roon Core Machine

Mac mini 4,1 (2010), Intel Core 2 Duo CPU P8800 @ 2.66GHz, 4GB RAM (2x2GB)
Running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
2 internal drives: 120GB SSD for the system and 500GB HDD for music.

Networking Gear & Setup Details

N/A - no networking issues

Connected Audio Devices

Denon AVC-6700H via HDMI (also use other endpoints from Roon, these all work)

Number of Tracks in Library

10,500 tracks

Description of Issue

I am not able to get any audio out of my Mac Mini Core running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. There are a number of audio devices showing up via ALSA, however the only one that actually works is CS4206 Analog (which is the internal speaker, mono, inside the Mac mini)

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According to lspci I have the following sound card
00:08.0 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation MCP89 High Definition Audio (rev a2)

Does anybody have any experience of this issue or know how to fix it? It is the last unresolved problem I have encountered, having switched from MacOS to Linux to enable upgrading my Core from Roon 1.8 to Roon 2.0.

Thanks,
Michael

3

Bump…… anybody able to help me here?

4

Self-solved….

According to this site: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html

The Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics card (NV50 / MCP89) is not supported by the Linux Nouveau drivers for HDMI audio. I was also not able to successfully install the Nvidia proprietary drivers, which involved rolling back to Ubuntu 20.04, as it gave errors and then crashed immediately on boot.

” 10 HDMI Audio only works for NVA3/A5/A8 (GT21x) GPUs. Some pre-NVA3 setups have been reported, but it’s no thanks to nouveau”

So the case is now closed, HDMI audio output on 2010 Mac Mini is not possible with Linux due to no driver support (at least that I could find).