Monday, January 12, 2009

Sound Troubles

I recently fixed the sound on my friend's new HP Pavillion dv4-1225dx. Once again, research on google and ubuntu forums (and openSUSE 's forums) was my only salvation. Apparently, many new sound cards have absolutely no standardized codecs. The basic steps were:
  1. Install Ubuntu Intrepid (my friend had already done this)
  2. Update alsa-libs to most recent stable version. This was higher than the
  3. Edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base to include the specific codec type.
  4. Make certain the volume was ALL the way up.

Alsa libs update was accomplished via soundcheck's script posted here on ubuntu forums. This compiled the newest alsa-libs, 1.0.18 in my case.

Further down in the post Temujin reposted model-specific information for the codec returned by the following command:
cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec

In my case it returned:
Codec: IDT 92HD71B7X
Codec: LSI ID 1040

Neither matched Temujin's list, but googling for 92HD71B7X led me to oldcpu's post on forums.opensuse.org. oldcpu pointed out that this was similar to STAC92HD71B* from Temujin's post. I added the line:
options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m4-1

to the file
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

The model doesn't make sense (this is an HP computer) but the sound worked after reboot. Huzzah!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll have to make sure it works but HP DV4-1225dx is my notebook model and sound was the ONLY problem I was still having. I think you just saved my hide. I'm actually a !# Crunchbang user (intrepid derivative).

Hey if your friend is having his keyboard and mouse lock up on returning from suspend all you need to do should be add the word i8052 to the end of the kernel line in his grub.

I'll prob write a howto thread for this model in the forums under my username tomorrow (ryofire).

Anonymous said...

Awesome! It worked on my HP. Thanks for posting this.

Drew said...

@Adam: thanks for the ups. glad it helped.

@ryofan: did you ever write that howto? I'll link to it if you like.
Drew