Sound Failure In CentOS 6.8

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Sound stopped working on my CentOS 6.8 system several months ago. I’ve tried everything I can to find out what’s wrong. It is not the hardware; if I boot into a live dvd of 6.8 (or any other OS), the sound works perfectly. So something must have changed in my configuration.

I’ve compared files on my system and another CentOS 6.8 system with working sound and I haven’t found any differences relating to sound configuration.

I’ve scoured the web for help, and found a few sites where people reported the same problem, but none of their “solutions” work. Many refer to sndconfig and system-config-soundcard which don’t exit in 6.8.

I’ve spent countless hours looking through alsa (and other) documentation for any hints that might help. Nothing.

If I crank up the volume on the speakers, and set kmixer to max, I hear a low level of white noise coming from the speakers. This noise does not occur when I first boot up, but kicks in somewhere during the boot process, I’m guessing when the system is attempting to initialize the sound card.

The only substantial info I have about the failure is the output from KInfoCenter -> Sound:

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5 thoughts on - Sound Failure In CentOS 6.8

  • When I select HDA Intel PCH, which is what it should be using, everything looks normal with one possible exception. There are three volume sliders labeled S/PDIF and the second one has “Default” tacked on to it. All three have volume set at zero and alsamixer won’t allow any change.

    The default should be HDA Intel PCH.

    I have a strong suspicion that there’s a config file somewhere that somehow got messed up, but all the config files that I’m aware of that might have anything to do with sound match those on a machine with working sound.

    Jeff

  • I think you set the default with the space bar, though I haven’t done it in a sufficiently long time that I’m not completely certain of that.

  • Space doesn’t do anything, but there are clearly problems with alsamixer. The only function key that works is F6 (Select sound card). F1 – F5 are supposed to do other things but they all cause alsamixer to exit. Does it matter that I’m running alsamixer from the command line? If I need to invoke it from a GUI, how can that be done?

    Thanks for your help, Jeff

  • ‘man alsamixer’ shows how to access the functions the F keys should do. However, I’d spent hours messing with alsamixer months ago, to no avail.