First I made sure to reinstall all alsa and pulse packages. I found a temporary solution to this problem. Please skim the alsa-user mailing list archives to understand better. There's various commands you can try for diagnostic output: "aplay -l" or "aplay -L" or "amixer scontents" I think you should clarify how exactly alsa sees your card (proper driver, channel mapping.). Post your nf with absolute path, as it is now and as it was before. Usually i'd say it's an alsa issue, it doesn't recognize your soundcard, but as you said, it seems that alsa sees it properly and pulseaudio doesn't. I don't know how I'm supposed to identify the string that identifies my card, so maybe that was wrong.
I added a line of code on the nf to help identify the sound card. Since ALSA shows "Sigmatel" in the alsamixer application, it seems it's done a better job identifying this older equipment, but somehow doesn't communicate that to pulseaudio. I just upgraded to Debian 7 over the weekend, and found out that the sound card is not properly configured. Any help is appreciated!Ĭhris9 wrote:with what pulseaudio identifies as an "Intel - HDA" sound card, and it goes by Sigmatel STAC 9200 elsewhere (laptop manual, ALSA mixer).
I'm still rather new to GNU\Linux and Debian.) I'd really rather not have to upgrade my laptop just because the sound wasn't quite right. (I'd same I have intermediate technical knowledge on a variety of topics. There appear to be many other dead threads out there on a similar topic. I must say, I usually can find a solution to problems I've had with Debian, somewhere on the 'net, but for this I'm at my wit's end. At this point, if the headphones work, I may just wire up a set of independent speakers so we don't kill the subwoofer, at least while we're at home. However, it would be great if anyone had any other suggestions that might help. So when I get home tonight, I'm going to try two other things I didn't think of: 1) see if the headphones work with two-channel output and 2) see if any other sound output works (can't remember if there's a "line out" or not). I saw many variations of what text to use on the web. I added a line of code on the nf (EDIT: specifically /etc/modprobe.d/nf) to help identify the sound card.Maybe that would work, allowing ALSA to take over.? Since ALSO shows "Sigmatel" in the alsamixer application, it seems it's done a better job identifying this older equipment, but somehow doesn't communicate that to pulseaudio. One thing I didn't try was to disable the pulse daemon from running. I uninstalled everything except the gnome dependencies, leaving libpulse and 1 other thing. (I think I had an ALSA-only system, which leads me to.) Oddly, the sound card and speakers worked just fine in Debian 6. Debian repositories have nothing about Sigmatel that I can find. This leads me to believe that the issue is more about the driver, and this gnome widget can't display anything better due to a poor interface between hardware and driver. There are really no options that allow me to select the right kind of card, speaker arrangement, or sound output. The sound tests all put the sound out on the subwoofer. Instead of displaying anything about Sigmatel, it shows generic sound equipment. I have investigated a few options to solve this: From what little I know about speakers, I believe this is very bad, since the subwoofer isn't designed to handle the entire spectrum of sound that would be output to it in this configuration.
The laptop has a 2.1 speaker setup, and for some reason the system is outputting all of the sound to the subwoofer on the bottom of the computer. I have a Dell Inspiron laptop with what pulseaudio identifies as an "Intel - HDA" sound card, and it goes by Sigmatel STAC 9200 elsewhere (laptop manual, ALSA mixer).