Cant get motherboard audio to work
 

I am wanting to use the motherboard audio when my sound card is starting to go on the fritz (left speaker is popping in and out). I have a recent kernel (3.9.0) and I have all of the PCI sound devices as modules but I just have no idea why I cant hear anything once I plug in my headphones. If it helps I am using a Dell Precision Workstation 530 MT.

The first thing I would check is the BIOS settings, because they are easy to check. During POST, the machine should display something like "Press F-something to enter settings." I have a Dell with an external sound card--because the internal one went bad--and, as I recall, there are some settings in BIOS about external vs. internal cards.

Since you say this is a workstation, I would also open the case and check that the wiring to the headphone jack is okay, for the same reason--it's easy to check and also because, if a wire has pulled loose, all the software in the world can't fix it.

Hi

The manual says the onboard sound is ac97 codec, AD-1885 16bit chip.

Remove the faulty sound card, and replace/connect the cable to the motherboard <> frontpanel. should Get your headphones connected...

You may enable onboard sound by entering the bios editor, (system setup, integrated devices, sound on:off)

see how you go.

Check alsamixer for the levels. A lot of times, alsa treats headphones as a completely different channel / output. And of course most of that is muted by default. But it may not be called headphones in the mixer. And sometimes the headphones settings may only be accessible from alsamixer depending on the kernel and card in question.

I checked and the Sound option in the BIOS is enabled. By wire, do you mean the little 4 prong plug that is coming from my CD Drive? That is currently plugged in to my soundcard but there is a port on the board to plug it into.

I will try what you all said.

I got it to work, I think all I needed to do was to remove the old card and reboot. it wouldn't play the onboard sound until it was out. Thanks.

Hey, that's what I thought.

Glad you got it working again.

Cheers Glenn

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