Arch Linux

lonesword

Member

Registered: 2020-03-08

Posts: 4

[SOLVED] External speakers do not work, but bluetooth headset does.

Hi,

My external speakers stopped working on arch about 2 weeks ago. I'm not sure what broke it - sound still works through my bluetooth headset so I ignored the problem until now. `aplay -l` detects no sound cards:

$ aplay -l
aplay: device_list:274: no soundcards found...

The no cards section on the troubleshoot wiki did not help:

$ fuser -v /dev/snd/*
$ fuser -v /dev/dsp
Specified filename /dev/dsp does not exist.

pavucontrol has "dummy device" as the output device.

When my bluetooth headsets are connected

aplay -l

still does not detect any sound cards, but pavucontrol has the profile "High Fidelity playback [A2DP]" selected and the sound works.

I'm not sure how to proceed debugging the issue. Any help/pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks

EDIT: I am on a laptop, if that helps, and lspci gives me this:

$ lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio"
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio (rev 21)
	Subsystem: Dell Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 32, IRQ 136
	Memory at d1228000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
	Memory at d1200000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
	Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel, snd_soc_skl

Last edited by lonesword (2020-03-10 00:50:04)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,743

Re: [SOLVED] External speakers do not work, but bluetooth headset does.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 4#p1888464

lonesword

Member

Registered: 2020-03-08

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] External speakers do not work, but bluetooth headset does.

Unfortunately, none of the methods listed there worked. I was hoping that moving to the lts kernel would fix the issue, but that didn't work either

lonesword

Member

Registered: 2020-03-08

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] External speakers do not work, but bluetooth headset does.

Interestingly, it seems I don't have the right devices:

ls -l /dev/snd/
total 0
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116,  1 Mar 10 01:12 seq
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 33 Mar 10 01:12 timer

I manually tried the following:

modprobe snd_hda_intel

But that didn't help

lonesword

Member

Registered: 2020-03-08

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] External speakers do not work, but bluetooth headset does.

Fixed it, and I still can't believe that this actually worked. I'm still using the lts kernel.

1. Went to bios, disabled audio, rebooted: aplay -l still shows no sound cards
2. Went to bios, enabled audio, rebooted: aplay -l shows the sound cards correctly!

^ I decided to try this because someone somewhere on the internet (not the arch forums) suggested this on a decade old thread. Who would've thunk

Sometime after I moved to the lts kernel and before I played with the bios settings, I had removed pulseaudio completely from the system. Not sure if this helps