Ubuntu
alsa-driver package

[14.04] Sound doesn't play; headphones play quiet buzzes

Asked by William Towns

Here's the output from alsa-info.sh:

http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=74ac0bde2e3ede1f802c4245c00aeef03f8a4c07

I've recently installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 14.04 on my Asus A8JP, roughly an eight year old laptop. Everything seems to be working well, except for the audio. The speakers don't play anything at all, and the headphones will sometimes play very quiet "buzzes" instead of the intended sound. I've tried purging and re-installing the alsa-base and pulseaudio packages, and tried a few different changes in alsa-base.conf. Specifically, I've tried adding "options snd-hda-intel model=auto", but have also tried using "laptop" and "3stack" as alternatives for the model, and have also tried using "position_fix=1" along with each.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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William Towns
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Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131) said : 		#1

It could be fixed by this commit (that landed in 3.14.x kernel): https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/cbd209f41ea5f39394de5c1fe2dd9aa54a9c5744

To test it out with current kernel, try manually passing the indep_hp = 0 option.
Command:
echo "indep_hp = 0" | sudo tee -a /sys/class/sound/hwC0D0/hints

Reboot (or force-reload alsa). Success?.

Revision history for this message
William Towns (wtowns) said : 		#2

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the response, but it seems that turning off indep_hp in the hints file doesn't fix the issue.

Is there any other information that I might be able to provide that could help track down the issue?

Revision history for this message
Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131) said : 		#3

Did you remove any other modifications you made (like 3stack) before trying it out?

The next thing I would try is latest kernel module/driver. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/UpgradingAlsa/DKMS
If it doesn't work with the latest module, report a bug.

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William Towns (wtowns) said : 		#4

I did remove all other modifications, and tried the suite of modifications again afterwards to see if anything had changed.

I ended up installing Debian, which seems to work perfectly.

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Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131) said : 		#5

Which version of Debian did you install (and more importantly, what kernel are you running)?

If it's a regression, it could come back and bite you when you move to a newer Debian/kernel version.

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William Towns (wtowns) said : 		#6

Debian 7.5.0, using kernel version 3.2.41. So it may very well be a problem that comes back to me; I'll keep the kernel module/driver idea handy when that happens.