Asus Eee Pc X101ch sound: Get a well working speaker And microphone

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sebastjava
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Asus Eee Pc X101ch sound: Get a well working speaker And microphone

Post by sebastjava »

This is just a part of a group of short tutorials:

Asus Eee Pc X101ch Mint installation: Start With Linux Mint MATE

Asus Eee Pc X101ch sound: Get a well working speaker And microphone

Asus Eee Pc X101ch image: Get a not-so-bad video playback

Asus Eee Pc X101ch backlight: Get a precise brightness control

Asus Eee Pc X101ch special keys: Get those missing blue function keys

Remember: I strongly recommend you Start With Linux Mint Mate! Some of the things described here will only work with Linux Mint Mate. But some others could also be useful on other systems.


Fix The Speaker

I had this problem with the other Linux distributions as well: the headphones are OK but the internal speaker is not working. Alsamixer is responsible for that. We can fix that.

EDIT Fri, 09 Apr 2021: What follows is a better way to fix the speaker, thanks to MrEen ! If you followed my tutorial before, you can now do this new fix, but you will also need to "undo" what you did before. See my next post, down this page.
  • Look for the /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output-speaker.conf file.
  • Right-click to open this file as administrator if you can, or else type this in the terminal: sudo xed /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output-speaker.conf and when the file opens find this section:

    Code: Select all

    ; This profile path is intended to control the speaker, let's mute headphones
    ; else there will be a spike when plugging in headphones
    [Element Headphone]
    switch = off
    volume = off
    
    Change it to this:

    Code: Select all

    ; This profile path is intended to control the speaker, let's mute headphones
    ; else there will be a spike when plugging in headphones
    [Element Headphone]
    switch = mute
    volume = merge
    
  • Save and close the file, ignore the terminal warnings and reboot.

Now, you should get both left and right channels mixed into this monophonic internal speaker. And when you plug in your headphones, you still get this good quality stereo sound, and the speaker is off when you are using your headphones. So, everything is now just perfect!

NOTE: Be aware that a pulseaudio update might overwrite your changes. In that case, you'll need to follow the same steps again.

NOTE: This was tested on Linux Mint MATE 18.3 Sylvia (32-bit), Kernel Linux 4.15.0-140-generic i686, MATE 1.18.0, in April 2021. You should always get the latests updates. Back in 2017, the microphone was not working properly, so there was a section to fix the microphone as well. But now this is not needed anymore and so, this section is deleted. Check the other post(s) down this page for archive purposes.

Sources:
viewtopic.php?p=1791086#p1791086

Changing alsa-base.conf to fix the speaker:
https://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/audio_intel_hda (in french...)
https://www.alsa-project.org/main/index ... _Intel_HDA
http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-ker ... xt;hb=HEAD

Fixing the microphone:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/279407/ ... put-volume
Last edited by sebastjava on Wed Apr 14, 2021 12:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Asus Eee Pc X101ch sound: Get a well working speaker And microphone

Post by sebastjava »

UNDO THIS OLD SPEAKER FIX (ONLY IF YOU DID THIS BEFORE!)

The speaker fix section got better. Before, when applying my old fix, you got sound coming from the internal speaker, but that was just the left channel. Now, with this new fix here on this re-edited OP, on top of this page, you get both channels mixed into this single, monophonic, ultra-miniature internal speaker. And also, the microphone fix section got deleted because it is no longer needed.

If you already went through this tutorial before Fri, 09 Apr 2021, and you want to go with the new way to fix this speaker and microphone, then you may also need to "undo" what you did before. Here are the "undo" steps...

"Undo" steps:
  1. Find this line of text that you added before: options snd-hda-intel model=headset-mic
  2. At the end of this file: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. To edit this file you need root access, so right-click on this file to open it in your text editor (Xed) as "administrator" or "super-user". Or type sudo xed /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf in your terminal. Disable or delete this last text line: add # at the beginning of this line so the system ignores it, or just delete this line.
  3. Save, close and reboot.

UNDO THIS OLD MICROPHONE FIX

In case you need to reset this, just do apt update and then apt reinstall pulseaudio (tested).

If you had fixed the microphone sometime before Fri, 09 Apr 2021, then this "fix" is probably not needed anymore, and possibly causing some trouble. But you probably don't need to do any reset operations since these alsa-mixer .conf files usually get replaced when updates occurs.

For archives purposes, here is what was done before when following this tutorial, but don't do this ! It is not needed anymore. Just get the latest system updates.

Before, if you wanted to record something, like when using Cheese, the sound input from the internal microphone was just noise. You could temporarily fix this by opening alsamixer in the terminal and turn down Mic Boost to zero. But you had to do this again and again after each shutdown/restart. So, there was the following fix.


For old systems only, here was my old microphone fix
Edit these 2 .conf files:
  • /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-input-internal-mic.conf
  • /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-input-mic.conf
  1. Under "[Element Internal Mic Boost]" set "volume" to "zero". (if set at "off", leave it there)
  2. Under "[Element Int Mic Boost]" set "volume" to "zero". (if set at "off", leave it there)
  3. Under "[Element Mic Boost]" set "volume" to "zero". (if set at "off", leave it there)

Search all 3 "[Element..." in both files to make sure that the required changes are all done. There aren't many, it takes 2 minutes. Save the changes and restart your computer to see (and ear!) the results when you record something with the microphone.

Note: Once in a while, there is a PulseAudio or AlsaMixer update from your MintUpdate. When that occurs, you have to re-edit those two files...
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