Dell XPS 13 Headphone Audio problem

English Hardware
#1

I’ve been struggling on and off for about a week now. I was having issues with the audio with Ubuntu 12.04 that came pre-installed on it, installed openSuse on it and started off with no audio at all when headphones are plugged in. After disabling pulse, fiddling with alsa for a while and re-enabling pulse, audio was working with both speakers and headphones.

However, after about a week of working, today it stopped again. I don’t think I did anything different, didn’t even restart, it just stopped again. I’ve fiddled with the sound settings in pavucontrol, yast, kdemixer and alsamixer and none seem to have any effect. All say that sound is going to the headphones, nothing’s muted, yet nothing comes out. I’ve also noted that when I try to change “Audio and Video Settings” -> “Audio Hardware Setup” hardware settings, no matter how many times I change it to not be hdmi it always switches back after I close and re-open.

Here’s my alsa-info.sh output: http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=887733a3a82f4078e6e2d46082b7347bc09f4866
If anybody can shed some light on this I’d be eternally grateful :slight_smile:

#2

Hate to double post, but apparently there is an edit timeout?

Dell’s official Ubuntu 12.04 image has this in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-headset-multi,dell-headset-multi

I made a new alsa-base.conf and put that in it. I don’t think it would, but would putting this in 50-alsa.conf help? My current 50-alsa.conf looks like this:


install snd /sbin/install-snd-module snd $CMDLINE_OPTS
install snd-pcm /sbin/install-snd-module snd-pcm $CMDLINE_OPTS
install snd-seq /sbin/install-snd-module snd-seq $CMDLINE_OPTS
#3

The /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf file entries should begin with:**
options snd-hda-intel**

OTOH The entries beginning with “install” do not work with this configuration file.

#4

Follow Up

Modify the entry so that appears as:

options snd-hda-intel model=
#5

Having your sound devices (HDMI as card-0 and analog as card-1 ) reversed is likely going to give you problems. Most apps will go to card-0 for sound by default. You may wish to consider reversing that setup.

#6

I’ve tried doing this through yast -> Sound by setting the second card as the default, it never seems to save the settings. Is there another way, or some reason why it’s not setting it?

EDIT: After testing sound again today, everything is back to working. All that I’ve done in the interim is suspend multiple times, no restarts. Is there a reason that suspending might set/reset audio with my headphones?

#7

I don’t recall that YaST exact setting.

Do you mean ‘Set as the Primary Card’ ?

#8

Yea that was what I meant.