Hello everyone! I have Orange Pi 3 and Armbian 5.4.28. Having repeatedly experimented on different displays, I found out that, most likely, with each boot of HDMI, the Orange Pi driver polls the display. If the answer comes and it is correct, then there is HDMI sound, otherwise - no. Some older displays are not detected in this way. But you can try to reload the old display while running Orange Pi. Most likely, a sound will appear. When using the HDMI-VGA adapter, I did not receive sound on the adapter’s audio connector. This also speaks in favor of the fact that the HDMI driver is "looking" for the correct device in order to direct the sound there. To this, I can only add that on my Orange Pi 3 Android board ALWAYS outputs audio to HDMI, including through the HDMI-VGA adapter.
which unfortunately, my qualifications do not allow me to fix this yet. But it is also fixable, what my years! (I am 70 years old)