Alder lake sound problems

English Hardware
1

Hello,

since a couple of days, I have problems with my sound on my thinkpad carbon X1 Gen 10.

A message containing the words “alder lake audio controller headphones” pops up, and the sound disappears. I went to Yast; the sound card showed as not configured. I did a quick automatic setup and then the sound worked – until a few minutes later it disappears again. (Repeating the step makes the sound temporarily work again). The sound is completely unstable. Any ideas what is going on…? Is this a software problem?

Thanks for any help!

2

Please show us the audio chipset and driver details…
inxi -Aa
Post the output as pre-formatted text (</> button in editor or Ctrl+E).

Not a power management issue?

3

Hello, here is the output of inxi -Aa:

Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Alder Lake Imaging Signal Processor vendor: Lenovo
    driver: N/A bus-ID: 00:05.0 chip-ID: 8086:465d class-ID: 0480
  Device-2: Intel Alder Lake PCH-P High Definition Audio vendor: Lenovo
    driver: sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl
    alternate: snd_hda_intel,snd_sof_pci_intel_tgl bus-ID: 00:1f.3
    chip-ID: 8086:51c8 class-ID: 0403
  API: ALSA v: k6.4.0-150600.23.25-default status: kernel-api with: aoss
    type: oss-emulator tools: alsactl,alsamixer,amixer
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.0.5 status: off with: 1: wireplumber
    status: active 2: pw-jack type: plugin tools: pw-cat,pw-cli,wpctl
  Server-2: PulseAudio v: 17.0 status: active (root, process)
    with: pulseaudio-alsa type: plugin tools: pacat,pactl,pavucontrol

I don’t think it is a power management issue…(?) It looks like the system seems to recognize headphones that are not there, and then just stops sound output via the speakers. I have no idea why that happens (and why it did not happen before). Not sure why the sound card then show as “unconfigured” in Yast.

4

There should be no need to configure the sound card via YaST. (This configuration module is considered deprecated anyway.)

I note that you are running PipeWire concurrently with PulseAudio. I would advise replacing the latter with ‘pipewire-pulse’. Install the ‘pipewire-pulseaudio’ package and let it replace the existing package(s).

You should be able to configure your sound using the ‘pavucontrol’ GUI utility. Check that the profile is as you require it via the ‘Configuration’ tab, and that the output devices are also set as desired.

5

Maybe “reconfiguring” the sound card did nothing but restart some processes in the background…

I installed pipewire-pulseaudio.

Thanks for the hint with the profiles. I have the feeling that pulseaudio randomly switched profiles. I have now “locked the soundcard” to one of the profiles. Maybe that solves it…

Many thanks!

6

That reads like progress. Fingers crossed!

7

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