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I have a late-2020 HP Spectre x360 14t-ea000 laptop with the Tiger Lake i7 (i7-1165G7) and Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Technology Audio Controller. I'm running Ubuntu 20.10 on it and the OS is updated.

The facts:

  • speakers do not produce any sound
  • headphone jack works fine
  • pavucontrol shows the speakers find and indicates it is working and the volume is turned up
  • alsamixer shows the speaker enabled and volume up
  • in sound settings, speakers correct show as Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound (no Dummy Output)
  • microphone seems to work fine (I can tap on the laptop housing and I see the sound level meter jump); this further suggests to me it could be a pinning issue
  • speakers work perfectly in Windows 10
  • rebooting from Windows into Ubuntu Live USB, sound works! Rebooting again, sound breaks. Installing Ubuntu while sound works has no effect, sound still is broken after restart.

I've tried all of the troubleshooting steps I could find, and I even upgrade to 5.10 kernel to see if that helped, but it did not.

I see similar questions but only one that pertains to a similar Tiger Lake machine and that one is still unanswered as of the time of this posting. Additionally, that one deals with Ubuntu 20.04 and not Ubuntu 20.10.

Output from hwinfo --sound

$ hwinfo --sound
17: PCI 1f.3: 0401 Multimedia audio controller                  
  [Created at pci.386]
  Unique ID: nS1_.OzxjZQmqK_F
  SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.3
  SysFS BusID: 0000:00:1f.3
  Hardware Class: sound
  Model: "Intel Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Technology Audio Controller"
  Vendor: pci 0x8086 "Intel Corporation"
  Device: pci 0xa0c8 "Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Technology Audio Controller"
  SubVendor: pci 0x103c "Hewlett-Packard Company"
  SubDevice: pci 0x87f6 
  Revision: 0x20
  Driver: "sof-audio-pci"
  Driver Modules: "snd_sof_pci"
  Memory Range: 0x603f290000-0x603f293fff (rw,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0x603f000000-0x603f0fffff (rw,non-prefetchable)
  IRQ: 197 (1681 events)
  Module Alias: "pci:v00008086d0000A0C8sv0000103Csd000087F6bc04sc01i00"
  Driver Info #0:
    Driver Status: snd_hda_intel is active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe snd_hda_intel"
  Driver Info #1:
    Driver Status: snd_sof_pci is active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe snd_sof_pci"
  Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown

I have found an Arch wiki page as well as another AskUbuntu thread which suggest the issue may be a pinning one related to the amplifier on the audio chip. I went through the steps recommended there as well but to no avail. Perhaps I'm not restarting PulseAudio properly (pulseaudio -k) after the change, or perhaps the pinning on my machine is somehow different.

Strange twist: I have found that if I boot into Windows, reboot directly to a Live Ubuntu USB drive, the speakers usually work in Ubuntu. I even tried installing Ubuntu while speakers are working, completely wiping out Windows, but speakers do not work after rebooting into bare metal Linux. I'm at a loss.

dcdruck
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  • Can you update your question to include the output of hwinfo --sound? In your sound settings, what options do you see? Is it limited to just "Dummy Output"? –  Jan 04 '21 at 15:50
  • Thank you @Matigo I have added that information to my post. No Dummy Output. – dcdruck Jan 04 '21 at 18:41
  • I've given up for now, bought a Pro upgrade for Windows and will use that until 21.04 comes out when I will try again to see if the software has caught up to the hardware yet. I can still test using a live USB for anyone that has ideas to try or would like more information. – dcdruck Jan 11 '21 at 13:49
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    Does this answer your question? Ubuntu 18.04: Audio doesn't work unless I switch between outputs – Raffa Feb 05 '21 at 19:17
  • I've got a similar HP model (14t ea0009) and have the same problems. I found that bugs have been reported and are being worked on here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1914881 and here https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=212465. As of today (3 June 2021), the only option seems to be to use the "boot windows first" method, then restart into linux. Sound at least continues to work if you use suspend... – jcdude Jun 02 '21 at 23:44

0 Answers0