Sound output issues on Manjaro KDE: speaker, headphone and dummy output

I have a problem with my sound output on Manjaro KDE. When I first installed it, the speaker sound was fine but the headphones were silent. I checked alsamixer and only saw a master speaker option. I changed the sound card and found a headphone option that was muted. I turned it on and then both the speaker and the headphones played sound simultaneously. I tried to enable auto mute but it didn’t work. After updating the packages and rebooting the PC, I lost all sound output and only got a dummy output. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Update: This morning, I turned on my laptop and booted into Manjaro and everything seemed fine, except for the earphones. They were silent. I repeated the process and they came to life. I turned the speakers down to zero so I could listen through the earphones only. However, when I restarted the laptop, the dummy output problem returned.

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Dummy Output is created if there are no audio sinks available for audio playback in PulseAudio/ PipeWire. I suspect Dummy Output is created when both Headphone and Speaker outputs are muted in ALSA

when I restarted the laptop, the dummy output problem returned

I suggest you unmute Headphone and Speaker outputs in alsamixer and use this command to save changes to ALSA settings

sudo alsactl store

This will save ALSA settings to /var/lib/alsa/asound.state and settings should be restored when system is booted

ALSA settings can also be restored with: sudo alsactl restore