Activate rear/front speakers on HP laptops

HP speakers.md

Activate rear speakers on HP laptops

Some laptops, mostly from the HP brand, are equipped with rear and front speakers to improve the sound experience. Sadly, they aren't detected on Linux. The reason is because those speakers are under "unconnected" ports, which makes Linux not using them because it considers them to be inactive. So, I made this little tutorial to (try to) get them working.

Installation

• First, you have to install hdajackretask to activate the hidden ports, which you can find under the package alsa-tools on most distributions.

Debian:

sudo apt install alsa-tools

Fedora:

sudo dnf install alsa-tools

Activation

After the installation, you should have hdajackretask installed. You can launch it through your desktop environment, or the terminal with:

hdajackretask

A new window should be displayed on your screen. Then, check the box "Show unconnected pins".
You have two possibilites:

• you already have information about your computer ports,
• or you have no clue on what ports are corresponding to.

If you already know the ports, you just have to reassign them by checking "Override" and selecting the good item in the list. After that, stop all the processes which are using the sound card and press "Apply now". If the configuration is good, you can then override the boot parameters.

If you have no clue, you have to repeat the process written above for each port (good luck 😅 ).

Fixes

Volume

Modify /usr/share/alsa-card-profile/mixer/paths/analog-output.conf.common to look like this:

[Element PCM]
...
volume = ignore
volume-limit = 0.01
...

kill-processes

 #!/bin/sh
 
 sudo fuser /dev/snd/* | xargs sudo kill
 systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket

ports.md

HP Envy x360 13-ag00000nf

• 0x14 - Front speakers

restart-pulseaudio

 #!/bin/sh
 
 systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket