Sound on Dell XPS gone again SOLVED

[stevengarland]

Dell XPS 9700 Mint 20.10 exclusive

Back in January, after a long post, Mr EEn and company got my sound going by switching to kernel 5.6 with soundwire built in. Yesteday my sound still worked, today it does not. Headphones only. The only update that I did was to Chromimum.
I need help again.

Thanks

[stevengarland]

I am moving this to hardware.

[stevengarland]

Dell XPS 9700 Mint 20.10 exclusive

Back in January, after a long post, Mr EEn and company got my sound going by switching to kernel 5.6 with soundwire built in. Yesteday my sound still worked, today it does not. Headphones only. The only update that I did was to Chromimum.
I need help again.

Thanks

[wallyUSA]

Dell XPS 9700 Mint 20.10 exclusive

Back in January, after a long post, Mr EEn and company got my sound going by switching to kernel 5.6 with soundwire built in. Yesteday my sound still worked, today it does not. Headphones only. The only update that I did was to Chromimum.
I need help again.

Thanks

I change mine by using speaker icon in panel. Try right click or left then select device.

EDIT: It is right click, then select output device.

[stevengarland]

Since I am not hearing from the audio gurus I used TimeShift to go back to when the sound worked. I did it and indeed the sound worked. Whne the updates came on I deselected Chromium (because that update is what I recall doing before the sound quit) ran the updates and restarted. NO SOUND.

I did the TimeShift again and got sound again. I then ran the updates deselecting kernel 5.6 because that is the source of SoundWire which was my original solution to the no sound problem. To my surprise, when I rebooted, no sound again. So now I am back to what I have on Timeshift with sound.

Some recent update has obviously cut my sound. I don't know which one??????

[SMG]

Some recent update has obviously cut my sound. I don't know which one??????

Based on what you posted, it appears it was not the kernel update nor was it the Chromium update. What other updates are showing in Update Manager? The only way to know for sure is to test them one at a time.

Everyone does updates at different times, so it is hard for us to know which one it might have been. I do recall seeing a firmware update this past week. If you click on the package in the upper portion of Update Manager, there are tabs available in the lower portion of Update Manager. One of them is "changes" (or something like that--I do not have any updates right now to check the specific language). You can see what was modified before you install the update. That might give you an idea of which update caused the issue.

[stevengarland]

Thanks SMG

Now that I have reverted back using TimeShift there are many updates that come up. Having eliminated Chromium and kernet 5.6 (see earler post) I picked some that I thought were less likly to have caused the sound issue and allowed them to update. Tested sound and it was ok. Some of the allowed updates were clamav, firefox, nvidia, thunderbird, kernel 5.4, kernel 5.6, chromium, and libreoffice.
Now I still see a lot of updates with no date on them. Among them mybest guess is 3 updates for alsa (which has to do with audio); alsa-lib, alsa-ucm-conf, and alsa-utils.
Any ideas????

To try all the updates individually would take much too long. I would rather move to Ubuntu 21.04 with the 5.11 kernel, or (UGH) to windows 10.

[SMG]

Now I still see a lot of updates with no date on them. Among them mybest guess is 3 updates for alsa (which has to do with audio); alsa-lib, alsa-ucm-conf, and alsa-utils.
Any ideas????

I would consider those to be suspect. I also see I have had some updates of libasound2, libasound2-data. libatopology2 which may be part of the same set of changes.

The below changelog is what I found on this page. I do not normally do detailed audio issues, so I do not know how that might affect your situation.

Code: Select all

  alsa-lib (1.2.2-2.1ubuntu2.4) focal; urgency=medium

  * d/p/0001-conf-USB-add-Cmedia-Audio-to-USB-Audio.pcm.iec958_de.patch:
     conf: USB - add "Cmedia Audio" to USB-Audio.pcm.iec958_device
     (LP: #1921452)

Here is Bug 1921452 which is referenced in that update.

To try all the updates individually would take much too long.

You can try them in chunks. You already know quite a few work, so I would take a Timeshift snapshot while it is working with those updates already done.

[stevengarland]

I may also be able to use Synaptic to roll something back. Thinking about it. I have 43 updates to consider - some look more likely as problems than others.

[SMG]

Thinking about it. I have 43 updates to consider - some look more likely as problems than others.

I did not look that far back in my updates.

Looking back to mid-April, it seems there were a lot of updates related to Libre Office which I would not expect to be related to sound.

There have been two linux-firmware updates in that time period and the 1.187.11 update does mention soundwire.

Code: Select all

  * alsa/sdw: support soundwire audio for TGL-H machines (LP: #1911830)
    - SAUCE: sof-firmware: add TGL-H firmware from sof-bin v1.6.1

Looking at the LP #1911830, it mentions "In the OEM project, we have a new TGL-H soundwire machine, with the current oem-5.10 kernel, the audio can't work.".

I also see "[Where problems could occur]
The patches changed soundwire machine driver, it is possible to make the audio on old soundwire machines not work anymore. But we tested the patches on TGL-U and cml soundwire machines, all worked well."

That looks like it could be a match with your problem. I do not recall the specs of your machine and do not know if it is Tiger Lake era. Maybe this means you can upgrade to the 5.10-oem kernel and have your sound working? I do not recall when you tried the 5.10-oem kernel or if you did try it. You can install the latest 5.10-oem kernel with sudo apt install linux-oem-20.04b, if you would like to try it with this firmware update to see if sound works with that combination.

[motoryzen]

@stevengarland

To try all the updates individually would take much too long. I would rather move to Ubuntu 21.04 with the 5.11 kernel, or (UGH) to windows 10

Well...what's more important to you? Randomly spending too much random time choosing hand fulls of updates at a time ..HOPING it won't cause the problem and you think you can rule out/find the problemed update faster? Or taking it one update at a time and ..know...you will find the culprit this way guaranteed?

Personally, I'd rather take the slow approach and then I can easily make a note never to touch that update again and blacklist it.

[vanadium]

Sometimes, a command "alsactl restore" may help to resolve an audio issue.

[stevengarland]

I went about it slowly and the problem was indeed with the ALSA entries as noted previously. I set them not to update in the future.

I have seen a number of complaints using google search about audio issues with both kernels 5.10 and 5.11. I certainly would not install them in Mint 20.10 as that would be really pushing the issue.

On a different laptop I have Ubuntu 21.04 with kernel 5.11. It is a Dell but not the XPS which seems to have problems. The audio in Ubuntu is fine. As I prefer Mint I think that I will just stick with it for now on my main laptop.