I have to make the sound chip of a Itautec W7635 (= FIC VA250D) work on a Gentoo(-based) distro (I'm now trying Sabayon). It is a HDA-intel (Conexant codec).
Using my earphones as a stereo mic, recording with 'arecord -f cd' has always worked perfectly fine, from alsa-driver-1.0.14 on.
However, when using a regular mono mic (like the ones that come in common headsets), recording simply does *not* work.
Here's the quick info:
alsa-driver-1.0.14: playback: ok recording: stereo mic: ok mono mic: no input at all (very high volume already tried)
alsa-driver-1.0.15rc1: playback: ok (even better than with alsa-driver-1.0.14) recording: stereo mic: ok (seems better thatn with alsa-driver-1.0.14) mono mic: *very* very low volume, bad quality, lots of low-volume noise, too.
Now the paragraphed info:
Playback is perfectly ok since alsa-driver-1.0.14, just like recording with an earphone as a stereo mic.
With alsa-driver-1.0.14, definitely no mono-mic input works, no matter the settings at alsamixer. With alsa-driver-1.0.15rc1, mono-mic input works very very bad (extremely low volume, terrible quality, lots of clicks and noise).
I guess that the mono mic needs a mic boost in alsa-driver-1.0.15rc1. However, with a 'grep -i "mic boost" .../pci/hda/*.c' (alsa-driver-1.0.15rc1 source code), it seems that only patch-realtek.c and patch-analog.c support this feature.
Is it even possible to add a mic boost feature to this codec?
The output of alsa-info.sh with alsa-driver-1.0.15rc1 is at: http://pastebin.ca/681023
Thanks a lot for any info, and congratulations to all of you for your terrific work with ALSA.
Pablo Hess