HP Spectre x360 with Ubuntu: Plugging in Headphones doesn't turn off Speakers

[EmilyShepherd]

Hiya,

I've just installed Ubuntu (Willy Werewolf) on my HP Spectre - most things worked straight away, and I'm super happy with it. My biggest problem that I've been struggling with is the sound: the speakers work perfectly, however when I plug my headphones in, sound plays through both the speakers and headphones.

I've checked out the levels in the mixer, and the system is noticing when the headphones are plugged in, and is turning down the Speakers channel correctly (as observed in alsamixer) - it's just that this seems to have no effect on the physical hardware. If I change the Headphone level, this effects the volume in both the speakers and headphones.

What's interesting is that, when the headphones are plugged in, the speakers actually disappear from the system settings and console listings mark them as "unavailiable". As the system appears to be doing things correctly from a software perspective, I assumed this may be a driver problem?

If anyone has seen anything like this before, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance 🙂

Also the little LED on F6 doesn't come on when I mute any more, but I can live without that so I don't really care (but if anyone knows an easy way to turn this on / off via the comand line, I'll get a script to do it).

[Huffer]

Common issue and it is a mixer issue with the alsa server. Look at a couple suggestions here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2168853

[EmilyShepherd]

I've already tried many variations of that fix, many threads in those forums suggest different options. At their advice, I've tried the following combinations of:

options snd-hda-intel model=xxxx

 Including: auto, generic, laptop, hp, hp-laptop. Unfortuneately none of these seem to have worked.

[Huffer]

Well Linux is a bit more complex than Windows. There really are not drivers in the way Windows has pre-built self-installing drivers. There are kernel modules and sometimes you have to compile the Code. You are not really a Linux user until you have compiled a custom kernel for your computer. Fortunately sound support is pretty well developed through the alsa (advanced linux sound architecture) project. They have done a lot of the work for you. You can go to the alsa website and download the latest daily builds and see if you get one that works nice with your hardware. Download, compile and install it. Look here:

http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2015/08/ubuntu-14-04-sound-headphone-speakers/

[EmilyShepherd]

No luck with the daily build either. 😕 (oem-audio-hda-daily-dkms_0.201603141004-ubuntu15.10.1_all)

[Huffer]

Did you try enabling automute in the alsamixer gui control panel?

[EmilyShepherd]

Yep - Auto Mute Mode is enabled, although I've tried it both Enabled and Disabled and it appears to have no effect - the Speaker channel is turned down when the headphones are plugged in no matter what Auto Mute Mode is set to - I assume this is because PulseAudio is set to automatically turn it down.

[Huffer]

I have exhausted what I know so you might try the Ubuntu forum and search for questions about sound on your specific model. 

[EmilyShepherd · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your help Huffer, I ended up finding the issue myself.  This turned out to be a problem with the pin mapping (a couple of speaker pins were set to use the headphones' output rather than the Speaker output). 

If anyone else has this issue, I used ALSA's HDA-Analysier tool to debug this and make the required pinmap changes. I corrected the problem by changing the following pins:

0x17 to Audio Output 0x11
0x1d to Audio Output 0x11

[1]: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/HDA_Analyzer

[Huffer]

Nice work