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Karnash

Member

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 9

[SOLVED] KEF X300A speakers

Hello,

I received today a new pair of amplified speakers, the KEF X300A. It contains an USB DAC and should work in the same way as an USB sound card. Sadly, it does not. As those speaker are really new (they have been sold since january), there is no news about running it on Linux. Well, maybe I'm the first one

I tested it on Windows 7 and it works out of the box, without anything to do, so I was very optimist for the Linux compatibility.

I initially tested with alsa, without pulseaudio. See my alsa-info here. As you can see, the device is successfully detected, with a name, as an USB card.

However, when I select the device with alsamixer, I've got a "cannot load mixer controls: Invalid argument" error.

~ % alsamixer -c2
cannot load mixer controls: Invalid argument
~ % amixer -c 2
amixer: Mixer hw:2 load error: Invalid argument

After googling those errors, I learned that a lot of different problems could lead to this error, and a lot of theme was still unresolved. Following this thread, I tried tweaking the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf file by adding the line

options snd-hda-intel model=auto # or generic

without success. I can't figure out which model match my device, or which options to add.

VLC is showing

alsa audio output error: cannot open ALSA device "default:CARD=Speaker": Input/output error

I then tried with pulseaudio and pulseaudio-alsa, without much success.

Then, I tried with OSS (with oss-hg). The device was detected without any problem, but osstest failed with the same error as the alsa/vlc combo.

*** Scanning sound adapter #-1 ***
/dev/oss/usb27ac1000-1/pcm0 (audio engine 0): USB sound device play
- Performing audio playback test...
  <left> Device returned error: Input/output error

As OSS USB support is experimental, I'm not very optimist for this solution.

For information, the X300A uses a SCMS USB3318 as USB controller, and the chipset Burr-Brown PCM1754 as an audio digital-to-analog converter.

Do you have any suggestion to get it working, or should I wait for a kernel update or something like that?

Thanks in advance.

Last edited by Karnash (2013-03-04 19:30:08)

Karnash

Member

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] KEF X300A speakers

FYI, I managed to solve my problem with some help coming from the alsa-user mailing list. This is not a perfect solution though, but some kernel patches are coming. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.alsa.user/37231