I have a Gigabyte Z390 AORUS Master with the same issue. Pulseaudio correctly detects which port is being plugged in, but output is sent to the wrong port. To make matters worse, the NVIDIA HDMI sound uses the same kernel module, which tends to confuse pulseaudio as to which device is being used.
Here’s what I did:
- run
pavucontrol - under the Configuration tab (all the way to the right - it might not be visible initially), disable any audio devices you don’t intend to use
- under the Output Devices tab, select Port: Headphones (unplugged)
- To make the change permanent, edit (with elevated privileges) /etc/pulse/default.pa and add ‘set-sink-port 0 analog-output-headphones’ to the end of the file to set it as the default output.
To list all of the details of your sound devices, you can run pactl list cards. When referencing the device number in /etc/pulse/default.pa, be sure to use the value under alsa.card and NOT the initial ‘Card #’ listing. In my case Card#0 was alsa.card = “1” and vice versa.