Hello, I’m facing a persistent audio issue on my newly installed Manjaro XFCE, on my HP ENVY Touchsmart k012x: my laptop speaker’s left channel doesn’t produce any output.
I tested my audio on: Left / Right Stereo Sound Test (Online). The right channel works, the ‘center’ channel works only via the right channel, and the left channel produces no sound at all.
What I have tried:
I have enabled stereo via PulseAudio (by tapping on the lock sign on the window). After doing so, both left and right channels are shown at 100, but there’s no audio.
Playing sound on headphones. Audio plays perfectly on headphones, but doesn’t on the speakers.
Further details of my system after running the neofetch command on terminal:
Did you try with another OS before to install Manjaro ? Like any other distro or non-Linux OS ?
You could also try to uninstall pulseaudio and install asla instead, there is alsa mixer with which you have the possibility to set the balance audio in command line to make some additional tests.
Yep, I had Windows 10 on this machine before, and the speakers did work.
It looks like I currently have both PulseAudio and alsa on this machine – I’m happy to uninstall PulseAudio to run some tests. But just to check, the audio should still work without PulseAudio, right? Or if it doesn’t, I should be able to reinstall, correct?
If so, would love to know what tests I could run from the command line to identify/resolve the issue via alsa. Thanks a lot!
You can also run “alsamixer” in a console for more visually controls.
But in any case, you may read man pages for both amixer or alsamixer and play with them.
And then use any audio player to see what you get (“aplay” if you want it in command line)
You need hdajackretask which is in the alsa-tools package, so:
pamac install alsa-tools
hdajackretask
In that screen you need to:
Select the correct codec
Click Show unconnected pins
and then it becomes fuzzy as I have no system information on your sound hardware but basically you need to override one or more of the unconnected pins to the features you want.
Once you’ve done all of the needed overrides, you need to click Apply now and test.
If that would give you an error message, you need to:
Wow, thanks for this - I seem to be getting somewhere! The good news is, this solved a different notorious issue with my machine: it comes with Beats Audio subfwoofers, but I could never get them to work. Playing around with the unconnected pin configs seems to have at least enabled Beats Audio – it’s always on, so I can’t toggle it on/off, but I’ll take it.
Now to the main issue: I’ve tried a few combinations, and what they all do achieve is to channel both left and right channels through the right speaker. Here’s how the setup looks:
I’m assuming each ‘channel’ (Internal speaker, Internal speaker (Back), Internal speaker (LFE)) can only be assigned to one of the unconnected pins (excluding the pre-connected 0x0d)? If so, then I’ve tried all 6 possible combinations of assigning these uniquely to each of 0x0e, 0x0f and 0x10.
It does seem that a similar issue came up for an Arch user back in 2014, on a 15" version of my 14" machine. In their case, the issue was that the ‘left’ speaker is actually on the center-right of their model, so the sound just seemed to come from the right.
In my case, sound only comes from the right channel. I couldn’t find an exact schematic for my machine, but assuming it’s the same as for the above user, the sound still isn’t coming from where it should be, in case my speaker is also center-right.
Could there be a different way to fix this? Thanks a lot for the help so far!
I guess to be more specific, by ‘different way’ I meant:
PulseAudio is also running on this machine. Should I uninstall this and try again?
Is there a diagnostic I can run on this machine (or through a USB) to test if this is a hardware or software problem? I tried the in-built HP Diagnostics tool at boot (by pressing Esc and then F2 right after power on), but it only had a memory test option, no audio test option.
Any other pointers most appreciated of course, haha. Thanks!
hdajackretask in the package extra/alsa-tools can be used to remap the unconnected 0x0f pin to Internal Speaker, and the 0x10 pin to the subwoofer (Internal Speaker LFE).
Thank you so much everyone. Unfortunately, I’ve had to be away from laptop for some time, but I should be able to test out audio from a flash drive and @nikgnomic’s tip by Thursday. Really appreciate your help, and will report back right away once I’m back online!
