Krdytkyu

I am trying to get my headphones working with Kubuntu 18.04 on my laptop with a Realtek ACL898.

Hardware

I have three 3.5 mm jacks on my laptop, Line Out, Mic, and Headphones, in that order. The headphone jack also includes a SPDIF output, judging by the red light it emits. All these are driven by the Realtek chip.

Issue

Audio plays through speakers just fine. If I plug in my headphones to the headphone jack, it has no effect. If I plug them into line out, they are detected as a line out device, Alsa cuts the internal speakers, and they work. This is a workable situation, though not ideal.

Testing

Running hdajacksenestest with everything plugged into the "proper" jack gives:

> sudo hdajacksensetest

Pin 0x17 (Black Line Out, Rear side): present = No

Pin 0x18 (Black Mic, Rear side): present = Yes

So my headphone jack appears to be entirely unconfigured. In an effort to find out which pin is detecting my headphones, if any, I ran hdajacksensetest -a (for the sake of brevity I have removed any lines that were (Not connected): present = No:

> sudo hdajacksensetest -a

Pin 0x12 (Internal Mic): present = No

Pin 0x14 (Internal Speaker): present = No

Pin 0x17 (Black Line Out, Rear side): present = No

Pin 0x18 (Black Mic, Rear side): present = Yes

Pin 0x1b (Not connected): present = Yes

Pin 0x1e (Black SPDIF Out, Rear side): present = No

So it would seem that my headphone jack is 0x1b, at least by sensing, even though logically we might hazard a guess at it being 0x19.

Attempted Fix

I used hdajackretask to reconfigure my jacks, setting either 0x1b or 0x19 to Jack connection, with jack detection both enabled and disabled, and with each pin as either Headphone or Speaker. After every change I went into alsamixer to make sure nothing was muted. No configuration gave me audio through my headphones, though some did cause jack detection to auto mute my speakers.

Final Note

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this and/or how to fix it?

I can certainly operate using the line out port instead as described above. I have posted this because I believe this to be a fairly common issue, and am interested in knowing what is happening, and helping others figure the issue out without spending as long as I have trying to figure it out.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.