alfC got me into researching how to get the SubWoofer working on my laptop. I didn’t buy my laptop for high quality sound (as long as Skype works for teleconferencing with co-workers, I’m good), so I didn’t even notice that it wasn’t working. So, here’s my research…
The Problem
On Ask Ubuntu, the question was asked: How to activate subwoofer in Inspiron 17r?
Here’s the issue. The subwoofer control is disabled:
The sound works fine to me. The subwoofer is just a bonus feature, at least in my opinion. Still, it would be cool to get it to work.
About My Soundcard
I found my driver was snd-hda-intel:
skp@chestnut:~$ lsmod | grep -i snd_hda_intel snd_hda_intel 33491 3 snd_hda_codec 134212 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_idt,snd_hda_intel snd_pcm 96580 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd 78734 16 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_idt,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device snd_page_alloc 18484 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
Here are the details on my card:
skp@chestnut:~$ lspci | grep -i "audio device" 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)
I read in the documentation that you can find the model like this:
skp@chestnut:~$ cat /proc/asound/card0/codec* | grep Codec Codec: IDT 92HD91BXX Codec: Intel PantherPoint HDMI
Alsa-Base.conf Attempt
I found a Debian system that seems similar: Installing Debian On Asus UX32VD. Just to try, I added this line to the end of the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf file.
options snd-hda-intel model=alc269-dmic
To test, I found from Ubuntu documentation, that I could use this command to restart just this sound:
sudo alsa force-reload
Unfortunately, it didn’t work!
Default.pa Attempt
So, on to trying another solution from here and here.
Next, I added a line to the /etc/pulse/default.pa file:
load-module module-combine channels=6 channel_map=front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right,front-center,lfe
After restarting alsa, it seemed to work. I got a new Output device that had the Subwoofer enabled:
I still can’t hear the output in the Test sound window. But, at least I have the front and back speakers working:
HDA Analyzer Tool
I found an HDA Analyzer Tool in this question. You can see the instructions here.
Here’s how I downloaded it:
wget -O run.py http://www.alsa-project.org/hda-analyzer.py
It needed root access, so I ran it like this:
sudo python run.py
