Q4OS Forum

lariat_of_doom

Member

Registered: 2024-06-24

Posts: 2

Realtek ALC256 - Sound is only output by one speaker

Hello, everyone

I've been trying out Q4OS over these past couple of days and it's been fantastic. It's rescued my father's aging laptop from the slow-motion hell of Windows 10, in the same way that antiX rescued my aging laptop once upon a time.

After seeing how it performed on my father's laptop, I convinced my mother to allow me to overwrite Windows 10 on her AIO PC. Initially, the results were similar to those seen on the laptop. However, after playing some music through Firefox, I noticed the sound was tinnier than it was on Win10. Surely enough, it was because the right channel was the only one outputting sound.

Alsamixer lists the sound device as a Realtek ALC256, which seems to be problematic hardware across multiple Linux distros. The thing is that all threads about this issue are over two years old.

Can anyone help me? Is there some configuration file I have to edit, or will I just have to wait for a future kernel that could potentially fix this problem?

seb3773

Member

Registered: 2023-11-01

Posts: 147

Re: Realtek ALC256 - Sound is only output by one speaker

Hello, in order to try to help, what is the output of
inxi -A

and the output of
aplay --list-devices

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My Q4OS scripts: win10/osx theming, perfs optimisation, laptop configuration, ...  for trinity users -->  https://github.com/seb3773/q4osXpack

lariat_of_doom

Member

Registered: 2024-06-24

Posts: 2

Re: Realtek ALC256 - Sound is only output by one speaker

user@user-20c020:~/Desktop$ inxi -A
Audio:
Device-1: AMD Kabini HDMI/DP Audio driver: snd_hda_intel Device-2: AMD FCH Azalia driver: snd_hda_intel
API: ALSA v: k6.1.0-21-amd64 status: kernel-api Server-1: PulseAudio v: 16.1 status: active

user@user-20c020:-/Desktop$ aplay --list-devices
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0 : HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI [HDMI 0] Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALC256 Analog [ALC256 Analog] Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

seb3773

Member

Registered: 2023-11-01

Posts: 147

Re: Realtek ALC256 - Sound is only output by one speaker

Can you try to create /etc/modprobe.d/alsabase.conf
With this content:

options snd-intel-dspcfg dsp_driver=1
options model snd-hda-intel = dell-headset-multi
options snd-hda-intel power_save=1

And restart.
(you may try with dsp_driver=3 too, or try without this line, it depends if you have appropriate  firmware)

Last edited by seb3773 (2024-06-25 04:45)

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My Q4OS scripts: win10/osx theming, perfs optimisation, laptop configuration, ...  for trinity users -->  https://github.com/seb3773/q4osXpack

bin

Member

From: U.K.

Registered: 2016-01-28

Posts: 1,333

Re: Realtek ALC256 - Sound is only output by one speaker

It may be worth trying AVLinux (based on MX Linux) in a live session just to see if it is able to work with that sound card. It's Debian based and would at least provide a clue as to if it is even possible to get that chip working with linux. It is, as you've found, a right PITA!

You probably saw this thread on the Mint forum - it related to the old LMDE5 = Debian Bullseye. So possibly some of the suggestions there may work with a Bookworm base???  https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=396192

Last edited by bin (2024-06-25 06:17)