Why I see two sound cards in YAST?

English Multimedia
1

Hello Open Suse users,

I have Dell Inspiron laptop.
Manufacturer suggest to download “Realtek ALC3223” sound driver for Windows for this model.

However, I am using Open Suse Leap 15.1.
When I type in terminal

sudo lspci | grep Audio

I see two items in the output:

00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT HD Audio Controller (rev 09)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series HD Audio Controller (rev 04)

I also see the two sound cards in the YAST configuration tool:

https://i.imgur.com/SzW7I5H.png

I pressed “Delete” button over “Haswell-ULT”. This card is displayed as “Not configured” on the picture above.

However, I can still hear the sound from my laptop and record messages from microphone. When I connect HDMI and switch sound to it, I can still hear the sound and set the volume:

https://i.imgur.com/4ztlOPF.png

When I connect headphones and switch sources, I can hear the sound in headphones and record sound:

https://i.imgur.com/nemLBYQ.png

My questions / doubts are as follows:

  1. Why I see two sound cards although I have not connected any additional device to my laptop?
  2. Is it safe to delete / disable one of them as I’ve done?
  3. Even when I have not connected the headphones, different applications states that multiple mcrophones are available (for example when I go to https://mictests.com/
  4. My colleagues complains about the echo when I try to call them. Is it caused by having two sound cards in the YAST?
2

Hi and welcome to the Forum :slight_smile:
Likely the other card is used for HDMI sound output as part of your CPU and builtin GPU… Safe to ignore and if connect over HDMI it should auto switch to use.

You need to mute the onboard one if using a headset with microphone.