Steam Deck Internal Speaker Volume Broken? Here’s the Fix

Fixing Quiet Internal Speaker Volume on Steam Deck After SteamOS Update

TL;DR: If your Steam Deck’s internal speakers are barely audible, maybe after a recent update – even when volume is at 100% – but Bluetooth and headphones work fine, here’s the fix that worked instantly for me.

🎧 The Problem

After updating SteamOS via the Discover Store, I noticed that:

• Bluetooth audio worked perfectly
• Headphones (3.5mm jack) also sounded normal
• Internal speakers were extremely quiet — like 5–10% volume even when everything was maxed out

In Gaming Mode, they were almost silent.

🔍 Initial Troubleshooting (That didn’t help, might for you?)

I tried:

• Checking alsamixer (volumes were all 100%)
• Switching sinks in pavucontrol
• Testing audio output with paplay and aplay
• Selecting the “Speakers” output manually in KDE
• Inspecting new sound devices like Rembrandt Radeon High Definition Audio Controller Pro7, Pro8, Pro9
• None of it fixed the problem. But since Bluetooth and headphone output were fine, I figured it wasn’t a hardware issue.
• Restarting sound services

✅ The Solution

Clear Old Audio Configs

Open Konsole in Desktop Mode and run the following commands:
If some folders do not exist, that’s fine – just continue.

rm -rf ~/.config/pipewire
rm -rf ~/.config/wireplumber
rm -rf ~/.local/state/wireplumber
rm -rf ~/.config/pulse

systemctl --user daemon-reexec
systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber

Immediately after, I had sound again.

You might possibly have to follow up with these steps:

• Open Start (Bottom left) -> Settings -> Volume Control-> Configuration (Small arrow pointing right, top right corner. Click this and you will get to Configuration)
• On Profile, select SOF Vangogh (Headphones, Internal Mic, Speaker)

💡 Why This Works

This issue is likely caused by:

• A SteamOS update introducing new sound devices or incorrect routing (as I did a SteamOS update just prior to the issue starting, but took me a couple of days to spot the issue)
• Corrupted or outdated user-level config files for PipeWire or WirePlumber
• The system selecting a faulty or mis-configured default audio profile

By removing those config files and restarting services, you force a clean reset. Selecting the correct profile then ensures audio routes through the internal speaker path, not a broken one.

🙌 Credit Where It’s Due

While I went through quite a bit of trial and error to diagnose this issue, a key hint came from a Reddit comment that mentioned deleting the profiles before restarting the services – which turned out to be the final piece of the puzzle. View the original Reddit ocmment