Getting mic to work with NVidia VT1708S

Ever since I installed opensuse 11.3, I hadn’t used my mic/headset. Today I decided to fool a bit around in Ardour, but somehow my mic didn’t work. And alas, I made a classic beginner’s mistake: “the solution has to be difficult because it does not work out of the box”.

I tried the standard stuff like trying out all input sources, adding hidden channels, etc. but when that didn’t help I was quickly diving into custom .asoundrc configuration, arecord/aplay sysinfo scripts, probing kernel modules, looking into alsa upgrade scripts and the like.. 🙂

Until I had an epiphany while reading random forum post words. I had been adding the “hidden” channels to my mixer which indeed included “mic” and “front mic” with accompanying boost controls. I noticed a few others which I threw in as well for good measure. I neglected them though, as I didn’t feel interested in enabling “smart” 5.1 or IEC958 2, whatever that was. But then I suddenly remembered: motherboards come with configurable audio backpanels, so this wasn’t really about enabling a fancy audioprocessing feature but rather switching between the 5.1 and standard audio panel, duh!

Apparently, the 5.1 was enabled by default, so “muting” it solved my problem!

Btw, in case you wonder: the HDA NVidia VT1708S chipset is actually a HDA Intel chipset with VIA codec, hence the VTxxxx name. To keep things intesting. 😉

4 thoughts on “Getting mic to work with NVidia VT1708S”

  1. Hi, I have same problem , I lost a huge amount of time trying to fix it and no luck and I need the microphone for my work. I tried setting the configuration to Analog Stereo Duplex but is not working(I have same vard and is not something trivial like the mic is muted), if you have any ideas on how to debug this issue it will be apreciated. Thanks

  2. usually, you can make things simpler by uninstalling everything pulseaudio related (just keep the lib around so other apps don’t get uninstalled). Then I would check all your channels using amixer (alsa). Also check your /var/log/messages for anything unusual.
    Also: how do you check whether your mic is working? When playthrough is enabled, you should hear yourself talking without using any app.
    Last time I recorded in opensuse 12.2 using audacity, I had to select a different input device from the default. I can check which one when I get home.

    1. Thanks, using the loopback trick I managed to figure out the problem, the microphone had a problem and when cable was twisted in an angle it worked(so when I teseted it on other computer it worked fine and I did not think that is the mic at fault).
      P.S. the email notification about your comment was marked as spam by yahoo

      1. haha, yes, defective cables can be a PITA. One time I bought a new external harddisk and couldn’t figure out why it sometimes worked (accidentally on windows) and sometimes not (on linux). Turned out the new USB cable was actually defective 🙂

        for the email notification I’m afraid I can’t do much, I’m using the standard wordpress comment mails and running the latest wordpress release.. but thanks for the feedback.

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