This has been a long term problem since way back in ubuntu 16:04 for me. The time I remember having the optical output working properly was with 14.04.
Edit: I'm now using Ubuntu 22:04 LTS but the issue previously experienced remains. I did tag 22:04, but I should also have mentioned it here. I could not however include this tag as i needed more posts to have permission to do so.
The issue I'm faced with is that from the lights on my DAC, when there is no audio playing, there is no signal being given as the light is off. And EVERY time audio does play, there is nearly a full second of silence after the light comes on before it plays any sound. So brief notifications can never be heard. Having had windows too in the last year i can confirm that works fine, and the optical out seems to give a continuous output signal even when no sound is being played, so it never suffers from this delay.
I'd not been bothered by this recently as I had switched to USB audio over the past few years to avoid this issue. However, USB carries far to much computer noise to my DAC and headphone amplifier, hence my reason to switch to optical, which is far less noisy.
But this is a major issue in Ubuntu and I can't understand why it has been the case for me for so many years. As you can imagine, listening to spotify with it skipping the first second of every track is very annoying.
Surely there is a way to get the optical output to be continuous the whole time like in windows 10?
Help would be much appreciated.
Thanks.
