Headphones vs. Speakers Audio Issue

[dmyersturnbull]

Hello all.

I have a Dell Studio 15 laptop with an Intel High Definition Audio 2.0 sound card under which I am running Fedora 9 and Gnome 2.14 under kernel revision 2.6.26. All my packages are up-to-date. lspci lists my audio device as "ATI Technologies Inc RV620 Audio device [Radeon HD 34xx Series]", although I otherwise don't know. Per startup session, sound will not play from either my headphone jacks (both) or my speakers.

I booted with different settings in gnome-sound-properties, but which device works under what settings seems almost arbitrary. It also doesn't seem to be affected by whether my headphones are plugged in at startup. SELinux and gnome-system-log report no errors. The issue seems indiscriminate of whether I use ALSA, PulseAudio, or OSS. I used the Windows Vista disc included with my laptop; my headphones and speakers both worked fine under it.

I've been experimenting with this issue for weeks. Does anyone have any advice (or a solution)?

Thanks,
Douglas

[LordMorgul]

Hi dmyersturnbull,
What do you have loaded for sound kernel modules? lsmod | grep snd should filter all the sound related lines I think. Is snd_intel among them? Are you saying that sometimes sound works with some settings, and other times it does not work at all? But it DOES sometimes give output?

When you're trying with gnome-sound-properties set to use pulseaudio, is the pulseaudio daemon running? ps ax | grep pulse
If that does not show a 'pulseaudio -d' process running, then start one with pulseaudio -D & and then try testing your sound again.

[dmyersturnbull]

Thank you so much for your reply. I'm really sorry it took this long for me to respond.

Here are my kernel modules matching 'snd':

snd_hda_intel         321692  3 
snd_seq_dummy           6532  0 
snd_seq_oss            29212  0 
snd_seq_midi_event      9600  1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq                44736  5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device          9740  3 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
snd_pcm_oss            36480  0 
snd_mixer_oss          16384  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm                60676  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer              20744  2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc         11016  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
snd_hwdep              10244  1 snd_hda_intel
snd                    46136  15 snd_hda_intel,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_seq_device,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_hwdep
soundcore               9288  1 snd

PulseAudio seems to be running but not as a daemon: /usr/bin/pulseaudio --log-target=syslog
When I tried pulseaudio -D & I received:
E: main.c: daemon startup failed.
What should I do?

Thanks again.
Douglas

[ashpro]

Hey guys..
I ve gotta similar but slightly different probe....I have a Dell Inspiron1525 laptop ....
in my case the sound doesnt come out of the speaker at all. .... but i can surely hear it from my headphones at any time....any idea why dis happens....

[LordMorgul]

dmyersturnbull and ashpro,
Could you both post the output of: /sbin/lspci | grep audio
(if nothing shows up from this command, post the output without piping to grep: /sbin/lspci)

It looks (from what I know) that the correct sound driver modules are loaded for you dmyersturnbull but as to why it will only play out one channel and not another I am not sure. The default configuration for the sound module could have something to do with it, if your sound chipset has some differences from others. I'll see if I can find anything about that once you've posted the lspci output, but its just a guess.

[brebs]

Just google it - example.

Might get a recent-enough ALSA by upgrading to kernel 2.6.26

[dmyersturnbull]

Thanks. Here are the results for /sbin/lspci | grep -i audio:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc RV620 Audio device [Radeon HD 34xx Series]


―Douglas

[LordMorgul]

Yep brebs might be on the right track with that, perhaps you should do the manual ALSA update and see where that gets you.

You could possibly experiment with alsa and the latest kernel out of F10... but do so knowing its an experiment and I have no idea what thats going to break when you try to upgrade your packages with them.
You'd do that with something like: yum --skip-broken --enable-repo=rawhide update alsa-lib kernel

The alsa-lib package in f10 is alsa 1.0.18-6.rc3, that might be a suitable workaround for you, but be careful how much that changes on your F9 system.

[dmyersturnbull]

Hey, brebs.

I didn't understand your reply. I'm already using kernel 2.6.26 and ALSA 1.0.17. Also, sound will play from my speakers—just not headphones.
Could you perhaps clarify?

Perhaps I misread. Let me try that (http://www.avalpa.com/assets/andrea/..._studio15.html). Thanks for your replies.

Thanks,
Douglas

[LordMorgul]

Yeah it looks like I misread the forum posts linked also, 1.0.17 is probably fine...
Make sure you note this that he says on that writeup page though:

# the only HP jack working (there are two in this Dell Studio) is the middle one!
# the other HP jack near the front of the laptop (HP2) doesn't work
# if i plug a HP in the HP2 jack the IS quit the audio playing (if i unplug, the IS restart)

[dmyersturnbull]

Just for anyone who's having this same issue:
Looks like the kernel and ALSA updates worked; at least, I updated to F10 and it's fine.