[alsa-devel] Problem with VIA VT1708S and git versions of alsa-driver.

[Mark Goldstein]

Hello,

Recently I'm having some strange issues with my VIA VT1708S on-board
sound card. The description might be a bit long, so I'll give a brief
summary first.

I have ASUS P5QL/EPU motherboard with VT1708S 8-channel HDA Codec.
There are 3 OSs installed on this machine: openSUSE 11.1 (my main
system), openSUSE 11.3, Kubuntu 10.04.
Audio worked fine until some updates at the beginning of September.
Since then I have 2 different issues.

1).On 11.1 - Line In control seems inactive, instead Front Mic control
controls the level from Line In jack. Front Mic is constanly disabled.
alsaconf does not show hda-intel in the list of detected cards.
Latest version it happened with is git20100925.
When I compiled stable 1.0.23 sources, everything started working as
expected again.
I reported this issue on bugtrack:
https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=5133

2) On oS 11.3 I start experiencing problems recording audio either
from Mic or from Line.
After some experiments I found out that the Capture1 control is
somehow broken. Mute switch is reversed. When it is unmuted, there is
no audio recorded. When it is muted, recording works. The same
happened to at least one more user of openSUSE, see the thread "How to
investigate the problem with MIC" on alsa-user mailing list.
I've also added my comments to issue
https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=5130 but now I
think it is different issue.
Even when I have audio recorded normally when Capture1 is muted, I
still have very distorted voice from Mic in Skype. It worked fine
before the problem started.

More details:
On oS 11.1 I had my audio working fine after updating to 1.0.23
versions of alsa driver. I'm using opensuse/multimedia: repository
that provides binary rpm of alsa-driver git snapshots.
I have only one current kernel 2.6.27.48 on 11.1.
On oS 11.3 audio worked right out of the box, since it uses kernels
with alsa-driver 1.0.23. I have 2-3 kernels installed at the same time
- normal 2.6.34 from official repository and 2.6.35 from kernel build
service.

I'm not sure when exactly the problems started, but definitely at the
beginning of September.

I've initially saw that on oS 11.1 I can't hear the audio from my TV
card connected to Line In. Then I noticed that Mic does not work in
Skype on both 11.1 and 11.3, while it still works on Kubuntu. When I
unmuted Front Mic on 11.1 I've suddenly found that it actually enabled
Line In.
I think now that something went bad with card detecting. Probably on
11.1 with latest git versions my card is not properly detected and
some "defaults" are used.

I'm attaching here 2 outputs of alsa-info.sh -
 11.1_stable captured with alsa-driver compiled from stable 1.0.23 sources.
 11.1_git25 captured with driver compiled with git20100925 version
from opensuse/multimedia: repository.

For me the problem with 11.1 is resolved, but probably it's worth
checking why latest version from git behave this way.

I'll continue with 11.3 investigation later on.

Regards,
-- 
Mark Goldstein
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