Hi, I'm using a HP EliteBook 8540w laptop. It comes with following audio card: 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 1521 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 54 Memory at d7520000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Udev automatically loads the following modules for this card: % lsmod | 'grep' snd snd_hda_codec_hdmi 23672 4 snd_hda_codec_idt 55508 1 snd_hda_intel 24053 7 snd_hda_codec 94273 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_idt,snd_hda_intel snd_hwdep 6300 1 snd_hda_codec snd_pcm 74958 5 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel snd_page_alloc 7217 2 snd_pcm,snd_hda_intel snd_timer 18966 3 snd_pcm snd 58997 17 snd_hwdep,snd_timer,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_idt,snd_pcm,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel soundcore 5410 1 snd I use plain alsa to handle audio. Alsa offers for this card (alsamixer -V all) the following controls: * Master (unmuted - 42) * Headphone (unmuted - 84) * Speaker (unmuted - 84) * PCM (unmuted - 85) * Mic Jack Mode (Line In) * Beep (muted - 0) * Capture ( 80) * Digital ( 86) * Muted-LED Mode (Follow Master) * Mux ( 0) To make a loopbak between line-in (mic input but configured as line-in) and any sort of audio out (speakers, line-out/headphones) I have to do: % arecord | aplay Does anyone has this card or similar, and experience the same thing? I might be mistaken, but I understand through reading different forums, that this SW loopback using alsa utilities beyond alsamixer shouldn't be necessary. Is that right, or it's just that alsa doesn't offer such capability for this card? If someone has figured how to avoid using the "arecord | aplay" loop, please let me know. BTW, I've played around with the controls, including Mux, and there's no way I can dispense of "arecord | aplay". I haven't added additional modules, like snd-mixer-oss or snd-pcm-oss, but they don't sound relevant to me at first (might be mistaken though), :-) Thanks, -- Javier.