Volume and sound - Possible to remap outputs?

Hi everyone,

I’ve recently bought myself a new Huawei MateBook 14s and installed Manjaro Gnome on it. I’ve been using the Gnome DE for a while now on my previous machine and generally am very happy with it.

After a few days, I noticed that I couldn’t adjust the volume on the laptop using the volume up/down buttons (the mute button was still working - similar to the problem described here [I can’t post links, so without the *h* from *https*]: ttps://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=91453).
After playing around with alsamixer, I watched as the volume went up/down for “Speaker” and not “Master” which is the setting that seemed to have the desired effect.

I tried replacing PulseAudio with Pipewire as described in a few posts, though this seemed to make no difference so I reinstalled it.

After a while, making little progress, I decided to plug in a set of headphones. Immediately the volume shot up, far surpassing the level it had been at before and was coming from the built in speakers and not through the headphones.

Since removing the headphones, I am now unable to get the system to output any sound without a set of headphones plugged in unless I manually turn on the Headphones output in Alsamixer.

It’s as though the headphones setting on alsa maps to the speaker and I can’t get the headphone to output at all. Appropriate output parts from inxi below:

System:
  Kernel: 5.15.46-1-MANJARO arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 12.1.0
    parameters: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.15-x86_64
    root=UUID=e6c4207f-2e25-4690-998b-dbef5b815243 rw quiet splash apparmor=1
    security=apparmor udev.log_priority=3
  Desktop: GNOME v: 42.2 tk: GTK v: 3.24.34 wm: gnome-shell dm: GDM v: 42.0
    Distro: Manjaro Linux base: Arch Linux
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: HUAWEI product: HKD-WXX v: M1010
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: HUAWEI model: HKD-WXX-PCB-B1 v: M1010 serial: <superuser required>
    UEFI: HUAWEI v: 1.20 date: 04/19/2022
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Audio vendor: QUANTA
    driver: sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl
    alternate: snd_hda_intel,snd_sof_pci_intel_tgl bus-ID: 00:1f.3
    chip-ID: 8086:a0c8 class-ID: 0401
  Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.15.46-1-MANJARO running: yes
  Sound Server-2: JACK v: 1.9.21 running: no
  Sound Server-3: PulseAudio v: 16.0 running: no
  Sound Server-4: PipeWire v: 0.3.52 running: yes

Thanks in advance. I’m a little lost in how to fix it as it seems to just get worse.


To confirm:

  • Volume buttons affect Headphone bar when headphones are plugged in, though Headphone bar seems to affect laptop output volume.
  • Volume buttons affect Speaker bar when headphones are not plugged in. Though does not affect output volume until 0 when Master then reduces straight to nothing.
  • Unplugging headphones silences the Headphones output until I turn it back on it ALSA (seems correct)
  • Plugging in headphones then reactivates Headphones and mutes Speaker (seems correct), laptop outputs sound through speaker and I can control the volume well using volume controls
  • There is not, and has never been, any output through the headphones
  • If I mute Speaker when headphones are plugged in then sound works
  • If either Speaker or Headphone is muted without headphones plugged in then the system mutes

Sad to say that, but as I see it’s a common issue for 11 gen intel chips and conexant cx8070 audio chip. I have the same issue with my Honor magicbook view 14. Looks like it’s a kernel/codec bug. [BUG] Huawei Matebook 14s headphone / speaker problem

1 Like

Ah that’s a massive pain, hopefully a kernel update fixes it soon