Speaker Test Connundrum
 

In Ubuntu, I was messing with pulseaudio settings after I had a small issue, when I found I no longer had sound or any devices showing in Settings-->Sound. I re-installed pulseaudio as well as alsabase and all seems well now with audio restored.

The only exception is with the Settings-->Sound GUI, where the Test Speakers test no longer produces any sound, despite showing a 'smiley'. I can reproduce this sound test in terminal with speaker-test -t wav -c 2, so it's not a big issue. But it would be good to be able to restore this test to the Sound Settings GUI. Any ideas why it's not working there and how to fix, please?

see if you can run this

if not you may need to install it

It should open on the Playback tab
Down the bottom Show all streams

now open the speaker test, and make it speak ;)
you should see it appear in the list on the playback tab

check it is using the correct output and is not mutted or low vol.

I'm aware of pavucontrol, but I've never installed it, and the Settings>Sound>Speaker-Test was always working fine without it. This has to be caused by a line in some sound setting file that is either missing or has been hashed out, but I've no idea where to look or what to look for. I was hoping someone might know where to look.

where spamming speaker test

in package pulseaudio-utils


the other one is easier