Ubuntu – No sound on speakers, headphones ok

audiolaptopUbuntu

My Laptop (Dell Vostro 3300) internal speaker (yes, it's mono) is mute already for some time, and I was just patient with this problem, because the sound quality is ridiculous anyway and I always used either headphones or external speakers. But I wanted to fix this nevertheless, for those few times I need that pity internal speaker.

There was no problem initially, but it appeared something like couple of months ago. It might be related to OS upgrades (Ubuntu 12.04 LTE right now), but, on the other hand, if I boot Live Mint 12, then there's no sound on speakers there neither. I thought that the problem might be hardware related (ie, the speaker is just plain dead), but I'm not sure how I could check that. Another explanation could be that the system thinks that the earphones jack is plugged in and the system just doesn't switch to the speaker output.

I surely hope this is some strange driver problem though and, thus, fixable. Would be happy for any ideas how to detect that.

Edit: I have increasing suspicion that the failed sense pin in headphone jack is to blame, so this is not Unix/Linux topic at all. Alas, there are no tests on this model to detect that.

Best Answer

Launch alsamixer in terminal, press F4, and see if you have a Capture column, check if the volume is above zero, also,

It might be muted

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Otherwise it would be like this:

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Related Solutions

Debian systems seems to recognize speakers but not the headphones for Lenovo laptops

This might be a silly answer, but could it be hardware ? Are you sure the headphone worked in Windows ?

I've seen that the lenovo has a combo headphone/mic socket, and there are people who have reported problems using a headphone with it.

The Lenovo community has a forum article describing an issue similar to yours here. With an answer here

FreeBSD: no automatic switching between sound in speaker and built-in headphones jack

Got back to use FreeBSD in my Lenovo, now using FreeBSD 12.0. The previous answer, while not exactly 100% right, put me in the right track.

To get sound to work, out the box, and switch to headphones, when inserting them in the audiojack:

The directive hw.snd.default_unit has to be taken out from sysctl.conf;
The as/audioset per default is 2, so 2 has to be used, and not 1. Tried as=1, an definitively does not work as intended.

Based on the default sysctl visual inspection, the question/previous posts, and @Trevor's answer, the complete configuration to get a Lenovo Ideapad 100S IBR for getting sound to work, and switch to headphones automatically is:

File: /etc/sysctl.conf

# Without this sound does not even work, both in speakers or headphones
dev.hdac.0.polling=1

File: /boot/loader.conf

snd_hda_load="YES"
mixer_enable="YES"
sound_load="YES"

File: /boot/device.hints

hint.hdaa.1.nid20.config="as=2 seq=0 device=Speaker conn=Fixed ctype=Analog loc=Internal"
hint.hdaa.0.nid21.config="as=2 seq=15 device=Headphones conn=Jack"

PS. The default system configuration, just for documentation purposes is:

# sysctl -a | egrep "nid20|nid21" | grep original
dev.hdaa.0.nid21_original: 0x04211010 as=1 seq=0 device=Headphones conn=Jack ctype=1/8 loc=Right color=Black misc=0
dev.hdaa.0.nid20_original: 0x90170120 as=2 seq=0 device=Speaker conn=Fixed ctype=Analog loc=Internal color=Unknown misc=1

Related Question

Ubuntu: No sound from speakers, headphones jack detected even when no headphones are connected