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

Possibly Related

• Ubuntu Bug #854468: Add support for IDT 92HD93 (Hda intel)