I was surprised to stumble across this - where I believe a muting of the speaker sound in MS-Windows carried through to GNU/Linxu - and I am still not 100% certain I believe this.
For a while I could not get ‘speaker sound’ to properly work on my Lenovo X1 Gen9 laptop with a fresh LEAP-15.6 install (earlier today). Headset sound worked fine. I tried different sof-firmware versions that made no difference. I checked all the standard places (alsamixer, pavucontrol, amixer, ran alsa-info.sh to check configuration) where in particular pavucontrol indicated sound should be coming out of the speakers - but there was next to no sound (there was thou a very quiet scratching sound in the speakers (where if all volume controls turned up 100% (some even to 150%) . I speculated this ‘scratching’ could be the sound muted massively.
Note that if I plugged in a headphone would I get very good sound.
I tried all the standard sound tests to confirm this (aplay, speaker-test, yast, various apps).
I noted sound worked ok under LEAP-15.3 the previous day.
I booted to a LEAP-15.6 KDE live USB just to confirm this was not a bad install (in my LEAP-15.6) and sound did not work there either - which was funny - as a couple days earlier I had sound working with this LEAP-15.6 KDE live USB. So I started(1) questioning my memory about that previous live USB test, and (2) being suspicious of a LEAP-15.6 kernel or sof-firmware bug (?) .
I decided to test sound under MS-Windows (I have a dual boot there I never hardly ever use). When I went to Windows, and tried to play sound (youtube video) and there was no sound until I noted in Windows that the volume was muted. I unmuted the volume in MS-Windows and immediately sound worked fine in the speakers in MS-Windows!
Suspicious there could be more to this I then booted to LEAP-15.6, and sound worked fine immediately now in LEAP-15.6 with the speakers in this Lenovo laptop. Go figure.
I speculate MS-Windows can mute/unmute the sound at a different level (?) relative to the hardware then LEAP? But that is speculation. If such is the case, GNU/Linux should be able to do the same - and that still makes me think GNU/Linux could have a bug here.
This was most bizzare. I don’t ever recall encountering such before.
In case any are curious … here is the " inxi -Aa " output.
Audio:
Device-1: Intel Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound 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:a0c8 class-ID: 0403
API: ALSA v: k6.4.0-150600.21-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 with: pulseaudio-alsa
type: plugin tools: pacat,pactl,pavucontrol
That was an interesting investigation.
I am now back to fine tuning my LEAP-15.6, adding the apps that I like to have installed.