Arch Linux

misc

Member

From: Bavaria, Germany

Registered: 2010-03-22

Posts: 115

[SOLVED] Creative CA0132: Front port sound fine, rear almost inaudible

I have this weird little problem with a fresh Arch system (mainboard is a Gigabyte G1.Sniper M5):

Sound from the front panel (headphone port) works just fine, but it comes out only almost inaudible from the corresponding rear port (as in, I have to crank up my external amp to max to notice that there's even something playing).

That with the same settings, ie. "Master" and "PCM" set max (all other playback settings are boolean), etc. No issues on Windows 8 either.

Now, I'm not sure if anything can be done about this as I suspect it to be an internal ALSA bug, but maybe there's a workaround (other than just using that front port, obviously ) …?

Note: /etc/asound.conf holds these lines to fix the chip's positioning:

defaults.pcm {
        card 1
        device 0
}
defaults.ctl {
        card 1
        device 0
}

edit: Sounds like this has been solved as of kernel 3.9.8. The lines are still necessary, though.

edit: Actually it hasn't, or only partially. Sound from Line Out and the front panel headphone jacks works now, but back panel headphone jack, mic-in (!) and the others continue to be dead, and a lot of other issues remain.

final edit: After chatting with the ALSA devs for a bit I found the reason: Creative's driver support blows hard. They only made sure that the CA0132 version of some Chromebook works, and apparently that one is different from almost all others. In particular, the chips each need some custom firmware blob, and with Creative being as uncooperative as ever they could only get those by a disproportionate amount of reverse engineering.

At least for me it's only the non-functional mic on Linux. On Windows it works, unless I reboot from Linux — apparently the firmware is only loaded once per hard boot, or something. I need to switch off the power supply for it to work again. Yay…

Last edited by misc (2014-03-29 16:09:32)