Sound disappears with earphones

English Hardware
1

Using speakers my sound works faultlessly. However, if I plug in earphones, the sound disappears slowly in the course of ten or twenty seconds. After the sound is gone, my speakers don’t work either unless I restart ALSA.

I’m using openSUSE 11.1 (x86_64 version) with the current kernel (2.6.27.23-0.1-default). My sound card is (according to lspci):
nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio
Hence with driver snd_hda_intel.

On openSUSE 10.2 the sound worked just fine. Does anybody have an idea how to make the earphones work properly with my current system?

2

In alsamixer (or your favourite mixer) you could try toggling the switch marked “external amplifier”. I suspect your headphones are low impedance and causing the hardware to shut itself down to prevent damage. If your speakers are internal to a laptop, you might have to toggle the switch again when you remove headphones.

This is a long shot.

3

How can I find that switch? I opened alsamixer on my command line, but I didn’t find such an entry (neither was the help mode of much help). The displayed version of AlsaMixer is 1.0.18…

4

Did you try scrolling to the right by using the right arrow key? There are more settings to the right than are shown on the screen initially.

I just looked using alsamixer 1.0.16 from openSUSE 11.0.

Of course, we may have different soundcards, hence possibly no such switch for you :frowning:

5

With the arrow keys I can only switch between “Master” and “Capture”. I’ve also tried out different keys that are shown in the help menu various times without any success. As it seems alsamixer indeed does not offer that switch on my system.

Perhaps there is something different I could try?

6

I have the same issue. Has anyone found a solution?

7

Unfortunately not.