Hi!

I installed Kubuntu 11.04 (64 bit) a few days ago. The relevant part of my configuration is:
Creative X-fi Xtreme Audio PCI-Express sound card
Leadtek DTV 2000H tuner card
ATI Radeon HD 3870 video card with HDMI (two of them in CF)
Cooler Master CM-690 case with the front panel audio.

I have three problems with audio and I think they are related.

1. If I plug in my headphones to the front panel, the speakers don't get muted. This works fine if I plug it in to the speakers' jack. I have a channel called 'headphones' in alsamixer, but it doesn't seem to control anything. PCM affects the speakers and the headphones too.
2. I cannot use neither the front panel mic jack, nor the line in, and I cannot see anything happens in Pulseaudio when I use my microphone.
3. The tuner card's audio out is connected to the sound card with an external cable via the sound card's line in. With TVtime I have picture and I can find the channels, but I have no sound. At Windows, I have to capture the line in to get sound but here I can hear nothing. I use alsamixer or Pulseaudio to turn on the capture. However I see sound input on a sound card that doesn't exist: Conexant CX8801. This is the chip on the tuner card, but it doesn't have an audio output, it uses the external cable. This card has disappeared when I have updated the ALSA driver, but I still have nothing at line in.

What I have tried:

1. Upgrade the ALSA driver to the latest.
2. Modify alsa-base.conf with "options snd-hda-intel model=X", X = { ca0110, CA0110, auto }.

The sound card is identified as card 2 (0 and 1 are the video cards) and uses snd-hda-intel (CA0110 chipset), the codec is Creative CA0110-IBG. The speaker profile is Analog Surround 7.1 Output + Analog Stereo Input. (The speakers set is a Creative Inspire T7900.)

I have tried to install a Debian Squeeze but with that there is no sound at all. Another interesting thing: I can play the test sound on the Phonon's 'Device Preference' tab, but I cannot on the 'Speaker Setup' tab.

Thank you for your help!

Hi there,

front panel audio jacks are generally a troublesome matter. I guess that your problem has nothing to do with your particular sound card, much less with your software environment. Usually the front panel audio jacks are connected to Line-Out and Mic-In of the sound card (or the mainboard's sound chip) with an internal cable. Assuming correct wiring, the back panel jack is dead when you plug something into the appropriate front panel jack.

I guess from your description that your sound card has a Line-Out and a speaker/headphone jack. Is that right?
Which of the connectors are actually duplicated on the front panel?

Okay, let's have a look.
(1) It looks like the speaker and headphones jacks are simply connected in parallel. This is what I would expect, by the way. Bear in mind that the mixer applet may offer settings that do not affect your hardware!
(2) The Mic-In and Line-In jacks of the front panel may not be connected at all. Can you verify that they are?
(3) That's a bit of a mystery. It's very common that the audio part of a TV card appears as yet another sound card. Conexant is a typical TV card chip family. Btw, I would not connect the sound output of the TV card to the Line-In channel, but rather to the Aux-In (usually a 3- or 4-pin header on the sound card) or CD-In, so it doesn't interfere with an external source that might be connected to Line-In. The mystery is why this extra sound card disappeared when you updated the ALSA driver.

I recommend you to approach the problem step by step.

• Ignore the front panel connectors for the moment.
• Make sure the Line-Out and/or Speaker-Out and/or Headphones-Out works when you play an audio file. As I understand from your description, this is the case already.
• Connect an external source, such as a CD player, to Line-In and make sure you can read this source. Once you can, you should be able to watch TV with sound via Line-In.
• Now try plugging something into the front panel jacks and see what happens.

Proceeding in this order, you can tell for sure that if something doesn't work as expected, the problem is in that very step, and nowhere else.

You have two video cards??

That's possibly why Line-In doesn't work. Many sound cards use the Line-In and Mic-In jacks for the extra output channels when they operate in a mode with more than two channels, effectively disabling any input.

[X] Doc CPU

Thanks for reply.

Details of my sound card
The front panel has a headphone and a microphone jack. The motherboard's sound card is disabled in the BIOS.

I have a Windows 7 installed and everything works as expected:

1. Headphones mute the speakers.
2. I can record on the front panel mic.
3. I have sound from the tuner card if I capture the line in, even in 7.1 mode.

Unfortunately the sound card does not have a CD-in (the original sound output of the tuner card), just a front panel connector. That is why I use this hand-made external solution. But I can verify that this works perfectly.

Yes, I have two video cards running in Ati Crossfire.

I have noticed a problem since my last post. The HDMI outputs of the video cards also use snd-hda-intel, so the output of cat /proc/asound/modules is:
0 snd_hda_intel
1 snd_hda_intel
2 snd_hda_intel.

I have tried to disable the HDMI outputs to make the sound card the default device by adding the following two lines to rc.local:
echo 1 > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.1/remove
echo 1 > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:06.0/0000:02:00.1/remove

Now the output is 2 snd_hda_intel and I cannot do anything with this. I have added a line options snd-hda-intel index=0 to alsa-base.conf without success. aplay also has this output:

I have had a little step forward. To make the sound card the default alsa device, you can edit directly /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf and replace all "card 0" with "card 2". However I do not need this anymore because I have completed the rc.local with this:
rmmod snd_hda_intel
modprobe snd_hda_intel

Now my aplay output is:
So now I have my sound card as default but I think this ruins my snd-hda-intel options in alsa-base.conf. Maybe "options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=ca0110 position_fix=1 enable=yes" would solve my capture problems.