[pulseaudio-discuss] Need help with audio gain on an Intel HDA equipt ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

2014/1/16 Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com>:
> On Thursday 16 January 2014 12:08:37 Alexander E. Patrakov did opine:
>
>> Gene Heskett wrote:
>> > Master and PCM, and those are apparently not slaved to the little
>> > indicator applet that pops up with a horizontal slider at the top of
>> > the screen when I hit the mute, vol-down and vol-up buttons in the
>> > top edge of the keyboard.  all 3 effect but the alsa sliders were and
>> > are now, wide open.
>>
>> Sorry, this can't be the full story. Your alsa-info file says that you
>> also have a Front control and a Headphones control. If none of these
>> has any effect, it is a bug. Please try moving all controls up and down
>> with arrows, including the controls that are past the right border of
>> the initial alsamixer window.
>
> I am fairly familiar with alsamixer.  I tried every slider for effect. Some
> switched modes or i/o jacks, without effect. I had an F5 in effect, so it
> was about 2x the screen width on this 1920 wide monitor.  Lots & lots of
> knobs with no audible effect.

At this point, because the Front control does not work, we can
conclude that this is an ALSA bug, in the kernel. Raymond is a much
better specialist than myself in this area, so my advice would be to
continue debugging with him.

A complementary strategy woud be to install HDA Analyzer, see
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/HDA_Analyzer . It is a
low-level tool that allows to control HDA soundcards at much lower
level than alsamixer. Run it as root. You have to work the way from
the correct AUD_OUT widget to the correct PIN (or it may be easier to
go backwards), and try to change various things. The Graph button will
help you to find the relevant widgets. If this doesn't help, just
treat the program as a black box. You only need to deal with widgets
under codec #0.

In general, for PINs, try to change the Active source in the
Connection list, try moving the sliders, and try toggling the HP
checkbox. For AUD_MIX and AUD_OUT things, move sliders and mute/unmute
them. If, by any chance, you find something that increases the output
volume or makes the Front control in alsamixer work, press the Diff
button, copy-paste everything from that window and send it here.

> A bug, in the docs? good heavens, how did that happen? ;-)
>
> But how do you convince a distro to update a man page?  In my experience it
> cannot to done.

Submit a patch that updates the manpage to the alsa-devel list. When a
new version of alsa-utils is released, distributions will pick it up.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov