No sound on GA-Z77X-UD5H motherboard (Realtek ALC898 codec)

gemarcano

I've been too busy lately getting my new system up and going to notice that sounds wasn't working on it in a timely fashion. Today I tried to do some video editing, and I noticed that there was no sound coming from my speakers. I ran into a similar problem in the forums, but I'm getting no sound whatsoever. There is one exception, as mentioned in post #11 in this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/996245. I can confirm changing the jack to the subwoofer output in the back allows for there to be some output. I have an issue with this, since I dual-boot with Windows 7 (which has no problems with the audio), so I do not want to have to switch the audio connector every time I want to switch systems (I love Gentoo, but sadly lots of games only run well on Windows...). Since there is some audio with one of the jacks, I assume ALSA is working. Does anyone have any ideas as to what can be done to troubleshoot this? Based on what I've read, this seems to be related to the codecs or modules as implemented in the kernel... I'm more than willing to try things out, I just don't know what to try.

As a side note, I did notice the following from dmesg:

audiodef · Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2012 1:47 pm Post subject:

What's the output of lspci, lspci -n and lsusb?
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gemarcano · Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2012 4:41 pm Post subject:

lspci:

gemarcano · Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2012 8:49 pm Post subject:

Alright, I upgraded my kernel to 3.4.4, gentoo-sources. I still experience the problem. Now, I did a little more testing, and I found the following (Here is the back panel):
If I plugged the speakers into the orange, black, or gray jacks (Subwoofer, rear speaker, side speaker respectively), I get sound, but if I plug in the speaker into the green slot (line-out jack), I get nothing. Out of curiosity I plugged in the speakers to the line in and mic in jacks, but of course, as expected, I got nothing out of them.

audiodef · Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2012 1:26 pm Post subject:

Let's start with the Intel sound chip. The one you have is well-supported by snd_hda_intel in the kernel. Do you have this either compiled in or loaded as a module?
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gemarcano · Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2012 5:13 pm Post subject:

BTW, thanks for your help.

audiodef · Posted: Wed Jun 27, 2012 12:58 pm Post subject:

The green one is usually labelled stereo out. The image you linked doesn't have enough resolution to show the jack labels. What are the black and green ones labelled?
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gemarcano · Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2012 3:00 am Post subject:

Sorry, I know the link doesn't have the labels (since that's the raw back panel without the cover with the labels). According to the motherboard manual, these are the jack descriptions with their corresponding colors:

Gray- Side Speaker in a 7.1 channel audio configuration
Black- Rear Speaker in a "4/5.1/7.1" channel audio configuration
Orange- Center/Subwoofer Speaker
Red- Mic in
Green- Line Out (for standard 2 channel speaker)
Blue- Line in

In Linux if I use the green (Line Out) jack, I get nothing, but I can confirm sound coming out of the black (Rear Speakers), orange (Subwoofer), and grey (Side Speaker) jacks, but not in Windows, which expects the normal speakers to be plugged in into the green (Line Out) jack (EDIT: or so it seems like).

audiodef · Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2012 1:36 pm Post subject:

That's really odd. I'm going to make a suggestion that may or may not fix it, but it will at least help ensure that your system is set up correctly and that all the necessary drivers are working.

Go to the "seeds mirror" link in my config and get your system set up with a kernel seed. Pay particular attention to the driver section where you need the output of lspci -n. If you're new to this, there's a bit of reading involved, but it's easy to follow and understand (I help the project owner keep it legible).

Once you boot up with your kernel-seed kernel, let me know if that changes anything for this sound card.
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gemarcano · Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2012 5:30 am Post subject:

Sorry for the delay, but I haven't had the time to use the kernel seed yet. I'm familiar with customizing the kernel by hand (that... takes forever), although I'm not as thoroughly familiar with my new hardware as I would like, plus I don't know what half of the non-hardware related options in the kernel do. That having been said, I took a look at how to use the seeds, and it seems simple enough. I wish I would have found that out a while ago! It would have saved me a few days by now of manual configuration! Aw well. I should be able to compile the kernel tomorrow (or today

).

gemarcano · Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 2:41 am Post subject:

I give up trying to get the kernel from the seed to work. I've quintuple checked the drivers needed for my system, and I still fail to get it to load properly. Should I post in the forums for the kernel seed to try to get it to boot? The problem seems to be that the kernel is panicking before graphics are set up (the boot screen flashes out, like in a normal boot with my regular kernel), and before USB drivers are loaders (I can't Ctrl-Alt-Del reboot the computer, and my optical mouse shows no signs of life). Heck, I even tried to copy some of the settings in my normal .config file over (as in, having two xconfig windows open and making things similar), to no avail (well, it did improve a little, since at first I forgot to load the nouveau drivers I needed for my Nvidia card). I'm stubborn, so once I rest a little I'll try to tackle the kernel seed once again, but man, it is annoying... This is probably because my system runs UEFI firmware, which makes booting a pain in general. I did enable all EFI required options in the kernel (at least the ones my normal one has), so that's not the problem...

gemarcano · Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 5:23 am Post subject:

I'm stubborn

So, I finally figured out why the kernel could not boot. There appears to be a bug with SLUB (or at the very least, a problem with SLUB with my combination of hardware and kernel settings). That took about 6 hours to sort out...

In the end, while I was comparing the .config files, I took the liberty to trim a lot of the fat from my original one, which now resembles the kernel seeds, plus a few additions of my own. Anyhow, FINALLY getting back to the topic, I did notice a few interesting lines in the kernel configuration about Intel HD Audio. Here is how it looks for mine right now:

gemarcano · Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 5:48 am Post subject:

Alright, I can finally give the result of running the kernel made straight from the seed with minimal drivers installed. Also, just for comparison, here is that kernel configuration's Intel HD Audio page:

audiodef · Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 6:17 pm Post subject:

The first Intel HD audio config was overkill, the second one is about right.

So... you can confirm that in Windows, the stereo out (green) works, right? This is definite? Because if so, we know the card is not broken. If it doesn't work in Windows either, the card itself is the problem.
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gemarcano · Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 7:00 pm Post subject:

The Line Out green jack works fine in Windows. If I were to guess, I think the audio processing works fine in Linux as well, since I can get good-quality sound from the wrong jacks. That's the problem, though, that in Linux sound is being output from the wrong jacks... Wait. I just thought of something. I don't know if this is the case, but if Surround Sound is enabled (how would I check that?), would Line Out be disabled and give way to the other three jacks that do work (since they all have to do with surround sound)? I'll try to see if I can find anything about this.

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Perhaps you're asking the wrong question.
Did you try other than 'default' device from 'aplay -L' list ?

gemarcano · Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 8:41 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the tip. I hadn't thought about checking which device was being used :oops:

.

That having been said, I don't seem to be making much headway. I used speaker-test to help me test where there is sound.

aplay -L

gemarcano · Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 2:59 am Post subject:

Alright, shameless bump. It has been quite some time, and this is still a problem.

I am now running Gentoo with kernel 3.6-rc4 (I'm not using gentoo-sources because they're on the 3.5 kernels, and those kernels have a bug with nouveau rendering me unable to boot graphically). The bug is still present. I can still confirm sound works perfectly fine in Windows 7. The Ubuntu bug report I mentioned on the opening post has not really been resolved, but some people have made mention of "hda-jack-retask" as a possible workaround. I know next to nothing about retasking audio jacks... perhaps someone can chime in? I'll keep doing some research on the subject.

vexatious · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Aug 2010 Posts: 86

I have a very similar issue going on with my mom's laptop (HP g6-1b60us) using Slackware 14.0 x64. My sound card is also an IDT and I get alsa complaining it can't find any device. Modules aren't loading but I managed to get some sound with audacious by manually setting the playback device to card 1 which is my analog output (card 0 is default but it's HDMI output) which is totally strange. alsaconf can't detect any device and complains about module snd not being found.

Alsamixer does load but I had to make an ~/.asoundrc to change default card to card 1 (was using card 0 hdmi as default). All applications still report default pcm device not found (even audacious though you can manually change the playback device and get sound); no sound in internet browser (flash videos for example). alsaequal doesn't even work with card 1 specified as default while using audacios...

This is a very strange problem since I can get some sound but modules aren't loaded for the sound card (lsmod shows no sound modules, not even snd); also, /var/syslog reports the hardware detected as snd_hda_intel and I have the modules available. modprobe -v snd_hda-intel doesn't say or change anything to make matters more confusing. I'm going to try compiling the modules into the kernel and hopefully that'll improve things.
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gemarcano · Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2013 12:36 am Post subject:

It has been quite some time since I've tried to figure something out in regards to this issue. Last week I started to see if I can do something about this again, since this is the only issue keeping me from booting to Gentoo on a regular basis (it's a minor issue, but I like my sound and I don't want to be using headphones all of the time).

vexatious, I don't think you and I have the same issue... My system identifies my audio cards correctly, and I can even get audio out from the green front jack, not the back. This is an issue present on the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H motherboards. I am not aware this specific problem exists anywhere else.

As for an update, I've run into an intersting websites in the last six months, here, which used to have a solution to the problem, before Gigabyte took it down. Supposedly messing around with some resistors on the motherboard would fix the problem. The thing is, the issue is workaround-able since Windows audio works fine. My best guess would be that the UEFI doesn't report correctly where the codec pins are, probably due to some hardware problem. I think this is a hardware issue because revision 1.1 of this board has come out (with supposedly no changes to the sound chip itself), and it doesn't have an audio problem like this one...

I found some alsa troubleshooting tools, like hda-analyzer and Ubuntu's hda-jack-retask. hda-analyzer was useful in helping to see how the codec worked, but I still couldn't figure out how to make sense of the 0x14 pin (green line out). It didn't matter what I tried to do, I couldn't get it to make any sound. I played around for a bit with pin 0x1b (headphone jack), and I could mute it from within hda-analyzer, so I know the program worked. The hda-jack-retask didn't do anything on my computer, or rather, I couldn't verify that retasking actually took place. I even tried to retask the headphone jack (that I know works) as a microphone jack, and that didn't work at all. Maybe I'm not using it right, or maybe the codec doesn't support retasking the front jacks...

So, right now I am at a loss. I have a feeling that the hardware is having the actual green jack pin be something else than what is reported to the codec. I'm not sure where to go on from here. I guess the next step would be to dive into the kernel sources (like patches_realtek.c), and start messing with pin configurations. At this point, about the only thing I know is that I may not get another Gigabyte board (they are unwilling to help with this at all). Still, since I'm not the only one with this problem in the Linux community, a work around (other than using another jack) would be great. I'm sure that the Realtek drivers for Windows have it, but I can't imagine reverse engineering those being feasible at all. Any input from the community? Any more information anyone would be interested in? If I find anything in the meantime, I'll post it here again.

Navar · Guru Joined: 20 Aug 2012 Posts: 355 Location: usa

Hi gemarcano,

Sorry to hear about your troubles with the UD5H. I seem to have gotten luckier with my purchase timing (Nov. 2012 from Newegg) of this board and have the 1.1 revision print. What you might have read are capacitor cap colors differentiating 1.0 vs 1.1 (blue vs purple) respectively. Not the first time I've ran into revision issues on motherboards and a reason I sometimes force myself to wait awhile on newer chipsets. Have you tried getting Gigabyte to comply with either correcting your board or exchanging for a revised 1.1? Obviously, they are correcting somewhere (perhaps the BIOS tables) for that jack working fine within Windows. Unfortunately, I have no easy way to test for your particular situation. Which BIOS version are you using currently btw? I obtained two of these boards, one had F14, the other I updated from F8 or thereabouts.

The only sound difficulties I've had have been getting mic input functional within gnome2. If you run into same, emerge sndpeek (real-time sound visualization) to keep yourself feeling more sane that it is there and working. I was somehow able to resolve this by rebuilding my kernel modular for sound instead of builtin, which was very odd given going back to the same builtin kernel would suddenly work too. Odd and not a problem I can reproduce on the fixed system. Definitely a configuration issue somewhere in alsa, perhaps gconf or worse udev (I hope not). Starting with a new user to get shiny new default config files for gnome2 didn't resolve.

I had the same board purchased for a family member and only recently fought with making a microphone functional within gnome2 on it as well. Same deal, microphone input shows definitely in sndpeek with builtin, although converting to all modules for sound didn't magically resolve the problem on the gnome2 side. They only have stereo desktop speakers and the green jack output has worked fine.

Everything I'm using is still analog 5.1, so no digital sound tested yet (although I wasn't left any impressions of issues there, unlike the green audio jack you mention which seemed primarily to affect mac x86 users.
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Navar · Guru Joined: 20 Aug 2012 Posts: 355 Location: usa

Hi gemarcano,

Correction. I do have access to a 1.0 revision of the Gigabyte UD5H motherboard. Sound is functioning from the green rear input jack. Let me know if you wanted to see my working kernel config. Right now it's a little messy (printk/debug, etc.) due to trying to resolve alsa/gnome fighting me on mic input.
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_______0 · Guru Joined: 15 Oct 2012 Posts: 521

gemarcano · Posted: Tue May 14, 2013 6:12 pm Post subject:

Navar, thanks for responding. I did hear somewhere that an updated version of 1.0 did not have this problem. I haven't tried the microphone input on my board in Gentoo. I don't use Gnome anyhow, so sorry, I can't verify anything there. I'll take a look at sndpeek. I hadn't heard of it until now. Yeah, I think from here on out I'm going to be more careful when I buy components. This was my first build, my previous machine being a Gateway 420GR from 2005.

I haven't tried to contact Gigabyte to get it switched, mostly because technically speaking they are not at fault. They do say they do not support Linux. I've contacted their support staff a few times and any time I mention Linux they tell me it's not supported. I tried asking them about known issues, and they just blew me off, in a way.

I am using F14. I think there is a beta for a newer one, but I don't feel like updating it just yet. Maybe over the summer.

I'm not sure how much help your config is going to be, but I'm not going to turn it down. I can always try it and see what happens.

_______0, I'm not sure power draw is a problem here. I know the sound chip supports a low power mode when it's not in use, but the thing is that when it's in use it outputs sound from all other ports except the green one, line out. My guess as to the problem is that the UEFI system is mis-identifying the sound port to the OS on some non-existent hardware pin. Without hardware schematics I can't even begin to guess where the heck the actual problem is on the board. Without reverse-engineering the UEFI ROM I also can't figure out how the motherboard identifies the audio ports and presents them to the OS. Just for kicks I may try to trace some components on the motherboard later. I'm no electronics expert, but I may be able to figure something out. It doesn't hurt to try. I do have a multimeter, but these traces are, for the most part, covered in a protective layer. Thanks for the ideas, though.

roland.graf · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2007 Posts: 25

I had the same problem with the same device.

I solved i by enabling the line channel in the Kde-Mixer and turned it on. By default inthe KDE-Mixer the line channel is disabled and the volume is zero. Same is with pcm channels