[arch-general] ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11 mic not working

[Sadeep Madurange]

Hi,

Thanks for the advice. I tried installing pipewire as well as pulseaudio but none of them worked with default settings. I think the issue with ALSA. At this point I have reverted all the changes I made back to just plain alsa with sof-firmware. Looking at alsamixer, I have multiple mics under the Capture tab. My alsa card is sof-hda-dsp. The chip is Realtek ALC287. I have following items in capture tab:

1. Mic Boost (I have set it to max)
2. Capture (maxed and toggled to on)
3. Dmic0 Front (muted and toggled off)
4. Dmic0 Rear (muted and toggled off)
5. Dmic1 2nd Front (muted and can't toggle)
6. Dmic1 2nd Rear (muted and can't toggle)
7. PGA2.0 2 Master (muted and can't toggle)

I tried increasing the volume of all of them to max as well as toggling them to ON but none of them worked. If I increase the volume of PGA2.0 2 Master I can here a constant cracking sound but nothing is recorded with `arecord --duration=5 --format=dat test-mic.wav`. Any help is much appreciated! 

On 2022-07-05 05:49:34, Ralf Mardorf via arch-general wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> only one client can grab an ALSA input or output device. Take, for
> example, the case of a browser playing a video or as in your case a
> sound server does already access the device, then neither a music
> player or by command line something else can use the same ALSA device,
> too. Before arecord can access the ALSA device, pipewire must be
> disconnected from it. As soon as pipewire released the audio device,
> test with arecord again.
> 
> In a nutshell, only a single client can access an ALSA device, such as
> a sound card's input or output channel directly. Several clients can
> access a sound server. The sound server shares the hardware inputs and
> outputs with the inputs and outputs of clients. When using plain ALSA,
> without a sound server or without https://alsa.opensrc.org/Dmix only
> one client at a time can use an audio hardware input or output channel.
> 
> I'm using either plain ALSA (without dmix) or the jack sound
> server, but not a ThinkPad's audio device, hence I can't help with this.
> However, since pipewire seemingly doesn't replace the ALSA drivers,
> usage of the ThinkPad's audio input and output channels should work
> with plain ALSA, too. IOW if ALSA already fails, then pipewire unlikely
> does fix this issue, unless pipewire does fix bad ALSA configurations
> automagically. Maybe pipewire does (re)configure ALSA, but way more
> likely is, the more layers, the more issues.
> 
> Regards,
> Ralf