Thursday, June 13, 2019

Disable speaker w/headphone Intel NM10/ICH7 Audio

The Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 0) is a common audio chip in many laptops, but it has a Linux limitation. The ALSA mixer (alsamixer) has no setting for disabling the speakers when the headphones are inserted. A cacophony of dual headphone and speaker sounds, playing 1 second apart, is the result. Further, because it's the sound system, not the error notification system (beeps, etc), the customary disabling of pcspkr will not stop double sounds. Once configured, we'll want to reload it by creating a /etc/rc.local to do alsactl restore. This can be verified by running chkconfig alsa-utils.

1. disable pulseaudio

Worthless pulseaudio has been addressed many times in my blogs. Check this link, or some other you prefer, for how to disable it.

2. alsactl

# alsactl store
Running this command generates the file /var/lib/alsa/asound.state. Unlike the 5 visible controls in alsamixer, the true 23 settings of the card are revealed inside asound.state. It's the file to make adjustments which silence speakers during headphone use.

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