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The audio on Mint with an old Dell desktop is bugging me too. Didn't used to be like this. For years the audio IC's have been very flexible, with the analog I
by fuzzfactor 2y ago
The audio on Mint with an old Dell desktop is bugging me too. Didn't used to be like this.
For years the audio IC's have been very flexible, with the analog I/O pins re-routable by software (expected to be drivers) to any of the 3.5mm jacks that may be scattered on the outside of the PC, along with any aux connections that may be merely an unused internal motherboard socket.
Otherwise you wouldn't be able to use a single socket for either speakers or a microphone, and have the system figure out which one it is when plugged in. And things like that. When they first color-coded the 3.5mm analog I/O's it was the 20th century and it was still a hard-wired approach.
With a modern motherboard the same exact board can be connected to a cabinet having 2 or 3 of the 3.5mm, or 5 or 6 and configuration could be selected (sometimes in advance) by specific factory drivers, accessible settings in a GUI, or both.
Windows isn't perfect any more by any means. Windows 7 or XP still works ideally with the original Dell drivers, but with W10 nothing ever comes out of the green 3.5mm, you have to plug speakers into the black 3.5mm. At least you get stereo then, but could select mono from Windows if you wanted to.
Using the newer Mint, you only get output from the green 3.5mm as expected, but usually only the left speaker gets any signal. Although sometimes you can set it for 5.1 surround and the whole pair of speakers will respond as the center channel. Depending on what you were doing with Windows before you rebooted to Linux, and whether or not you cold-power-up. But there is no provision to set Mint for mono at all which would be the perfect workaround.
That would get us by until the flaws in the audio get corrected. It would be good to have user access to the pin-to-jack hardware configuration too, but the inconsistency could be a sign of deeper defects.
Didn't used to be this bad.