You are not logged in.
Hi,
I have been unable to persuade the internal microphone to work correctly (plain Alsa) on a HP Pavilion dv6700 laptop.
Varying the 'Capture' and 'Digital' settings in alsamixer and testing with arecord, a voice is sometimes audible, but only with a great deal (an unusable amount) of noise. Lessening the noise lessens the audibility of the voice.
I have experimented with numerous
options snd-hda-intel model=...variations in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf, with and without further options ('position_fix=...', 'enable_msi=...'), to no avail. Typically with these variations no voice is audible at all except at very high volume levels, at which there is a very great deal of noise.
Here is the output of arecord --list-devices.
**** List of CAPTURE DEVICES ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: CONEXANT Analog [CONEXANT Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0And the output of
cat /proc/asound/card0/codec* | grep Codecis as follows.
Codec: Conexant CX20561 (Hermosa)Just let me know if I can provide any further information which would be helpful.
If anyone has found a 'model=...' variation for this laptop and this sound card which works, I'd be very grateful if you could let me know. Otherwise any help that you can give would be much appreciated!
Thanks!
EDIT: With an external microphone there is a clearly audible buzz, but the noise is not as severe as with the internal microphone. No amount of tweaking in alsamixer seems to remove the buzz when using the external microphone, or reduce it to a usable level.
Last edited by rdw (2012-07-03 08:40:55)
Offline
I have a different codec than your CX20561, so what I'm about to say may not apply. And I'm not sure what you mean by "noise" (sounds are difficult to describe). But...
My codec has some controls in both alsamixer and "amixer contents" that include the words "Mic Boost". These are amplifiers that have what I call "crude settings". Meaning that they jump a far amount on a single up or down level change... about 1/3rd of full scale... and they cause my mic to sound like crap if they're used (not at the zero level).
I found this out by firing up alsamixer in one terminal and running this command in another:
arecord -f cd -vv --vumeter=stereo -D plughw:X,Y /dev/null
The text mode "VU Meters" were pegged on almost any sound. So I played around with alsamixer settings while having a one sided conversation until the VU Meters looked somewhat reasonable.
As for the "model=". There are currently none available for the CX205561, although I do see where they do something special in the ALSA driver for the HP DV6736 starting with the version 3.2 kernels. But it only "wires" the codec nodes a special way.
You codec chip seems to have a "digital microphone" capability along with typical analog mics. If it's actually using the digital path for your internal mic, then ignore all the above. I can't be sure what it's using because Conexant doesn't seem to want to publish their chip datasheets to the world.
Last edited by pigiron (2012-07-02 22:20:29)
Offline
I have a different Conexant chipset (Conexant CX20590) and my microphone is also unusable due to noise. (It sounds like a jet engine as well as me or it sounds like nothing - can't get just me with no jet engine effect.) For input, I get three columns in alsamixer: Capture; Analog Mic Boost; Digital. Analog Mic Boost has no column but is at 20dB; Digital is at 25 (dB gain: 0.50) and Capture at 78 (dB gain: 0.00).
Does this mean there are two "paths"? Or that it is somehow using both analog and digital? (Surely that's not possible?)
I'm pretty sure my microphone should work - I've seen others report the microphone as working fine on this model. (Though one never knows if the same model laptop is the same in every detail, of course.) It is very annoying as colleagues expect me to be able to use Skype...
Last edited by cfr (2012-07-03 00:58:15)
CLI Paste | How To Ask Questions
Arch Linux | x86_64 | GPT | EFI boot | refind | stub loader | systemd | LVM2 on LUKS
Lenovo x270 | Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7200U CPU @ 2.50GHz | Intel Wireless 8265/8275 | US keyboard w/ Euro | 512G NVMe INTEL SSDPEKKF512G7L
Offline
The following describes the situation perfectly, thanks cfr!
It sounds like a jet engine as well as me or it sounds like nothing - can't get just me with no jet engine effect.
Thanks very much for your message, pigiron - unfortunately no joy so far, though.
The controls available to me in alsamixer differ somewhat from yours and those which cfr describes. The output of
amixer controlsis as follows.
numid=4,iface=MIXER,name='Master Playback Switch'
numid=3,iface=MIXER,name='Master Playback Volume'
numid=12,iface=MIXER,name='PCM Playback Volume'
numid=2,iface=MIXER,name='Capture Switch'
numid=1,iface=MIXER,name='Capture Volume'
numid=9,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Default PCM Playback Switch'
numid=5,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Playback Con Mask'
numid=6,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Playback Pro Mask'
numid=7,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Playback Default'
numid=8,iface=MIXER,name='IEC958 Playback Switch'
numid=11,iface=MIXER,name='Beep Playback Switch'
numid=10,iface=MIXER,name='Beep Playback Volume'
numid=13,iface=MIXER,name='Digital Capture Volume'Some variations of
options snd-hda-intel model=...in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf give rise to other controls, but, as mentioned in the original post, the microphone appears to exhibit worse behaviour in these cases than with the default settings.
Thanks very much for the 'VU Meters' suggestion, I wasn't previously aware of it (though it didn't directly help so far, it is useful to know).
I was aware of and had tried the model=hp-dv6736 variation, thanks - it seems to behave in the same way as the default configuration (somewhat unusually - as I say, most of these variations behave a little differently).
Would there be any way to detect if a digital path was being used for the internal microphone?
Offline