Greetings! All right, I am going nuts here, I cannot figure this out. I just bought a new laptop (MSI GT735) with an ATI Azalia audio chipset. I'm not entirely sure this is what it is as when I load everything, it shows up as both ATI and Realtek ALC888. The driver I use is the hda-intel driver.

The issue that I am having is that I cannot get any audio out of the speakers on the laptop itself, however it plays just fine when I plug my headphones into the headphone jack. I can very faintly hear the subwoofer playing when I turn up the 'Front' control in gnome-alsamixer (yes the laptop came with a subwoofer). I know that the speakers themselves work as they play under, yikes, Windows.

My kernel config is as follows:
<*> Intel HD Audio [*] Build hwdep interface for HD-audio driver[*] Support digital beep via input layer[*] Build Realtek HD-audio codec support [*] Build Analog Device HD-audio codec support[*] Build IDT/Sigmatel HD-audio codec support [*] Build VIA HD-audio codec support [*] Build ATI HDMI HD-audio codec support[*] Build NVIDIA HDMI HD-audio codec support[*] Build Conexant HD-audio codec support[*] Build C-Media HD-audio codec support[*] Build Silicon Labs 3054 HD-modem codec support[*] Enable generic HD-audio codec parser [*] Aggressive power-saving on HD-audio
(60) Default time-out for HD-audio power-save mode

As a last ditch effort, I ended up building everything in as a few other people only said to do so for the ATI audio (not really sure why). Any help with this would be nice. It is confusing me as to why audio works everywhere but through the actual speakers on the laptop.

I configure support for alsa built in and everything else as modules, This may help.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/alsa-guide.xml
Did you play with the sliders with alsamixer?

Everything in alsamixer is unmuted and turned up all the way. I have the snd-intel-hda driver built as a module now but still am getting nowhere. Does anyone know if there are any options I can give the module when I modprobe it? The only thing I found was an 'model' option and have attempted using 'auto' with it, but no luck. I would love to get the speakers working on this thing in Linux as they sound very nice for laptop speakers when played under Windows AND switching to Windows just to use the speakers is completely out of the question.

By the way, admins, is there a way that I can add 'Solved' to the thread topic?

I GOT IT! Thanks to some other threads and looking all over the web, I finally figured it out. There were in fact module options to pass when modprobing. I found the entire list in Documentation/sound/alsa/ALSA-Configuration.txt and just scrolled down to the hda-intel section. There are two options for my laptop (MSI GT735) that seem to work, although they sound a bit different so I am going to continue to play around with them more and will report back what I find.

Did you find anything out? I'm about to proceed to try a bunch of options and will post here for anyone else googling the problem in the future as we both attempted.

My experimenting says
in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf on Ubuntu is a good idea. I believe as long as you have it in a .conf file in /etc/modprobe.d/ it will have the same effect. I have the back speakers + the subwoofer working.