XMG P505 Headphone Jack - Sounds Easy

The original article was first published 20/07/2015 on my old blog. It has been slightly modified.

I recently bought a new notebook. The XMG P505 by Schenker Technologies. I chose Schenker because after reading about their products and examining their website, i noticed that they do a lot of things right!

Things I liked about the options and notebooks:

Displays are all matte.
Good customization.
Notebooks are generally easy to upgrade. I can replace the battery.
Options for loads of memory.
Change of keyboard layout free of charge.
Option for no laser engraving of the company logo.
Optionally without OS
No crap-ware preinstalled
Reasonable configurations of things like RAID.
Additional customer whishes via comments.
Metal chassis

They use barebones from Clevo and customize them according to your demands.

At first I head problems with the headphone-jack on Windows 8.1. Apparently you have to install it in UEFI mode. But I came to my senses and installed Ubuntu as a base system.

Anyway same problem. Headphone-jack didn't work. Called support. Support said that Windows requires to be installed in UEFI mode. For Linux it is the other way around. (Note: Sadly, there is no Linux Support from Schenker). Ok reinstall Ubuntu... No sound.

Digging through countless posts about how to configure ALSA, I found a lot of useless information. A few weeks i worked without headphone sound until it got annoying. So i started another research session and found out it might be the PIN configuration. Well i'm no expert but apparently there is a configuration which wires the pins of the audio chip to different out and inputs.

For Ubuntu 14.04 the default configuration is in /sys/class/sound/hwC1D0/init_pin_configs:

0x11 0x4010c000
0x12 0x90a60150
0x14 0x90170110
0x15 0x411111f0
0x16 0x411111f0
0x17 0x01011020
0x18 0x01a11060
0x19 0x411111f0
0x1a 0x411111f0
0x1b 0x01011030
0x1c 0x411111f0
0x1d 0x40341429
0x1e 0x01441140
0x1f 0x411111f0

NOTE: hwC1D0 is my Hda Intel PCH Soundcard

The PIN of interest in this case was 0x1b. I found out that I head to configure it as Headphone. You can do that by overriding it in /sys/class/sound/hwC1D0/user_pin_config:

0x1b 0x0321403f

If you don't want to do it by hand, I recommend the hdajackretask tool. It's part of the alsa-tools-gui package. Open it and select the right audio codec (Realtek ALC892 in my case). Then you can override all PINs in a graphical interaface and click Apply now. BOOM MAGIC... it works.

I'm really glad I could resolve this issue. Buying an expensive notebook that doesn't work out-of-the-box with Linux is a little bit scary :).

Storax

XMG P505 Headphone Jack - Sounds Easy

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