For the past few weeks I’ve had no sound coming from my computer. I switched over from having sound support built in to the kernel to loaded as modules, and everything worked fine. Then, just to be sure, I re-ran the configuration… and it broke. Every single step in the guide I was using worked fine, with no errors at all or anything, until the part where you were supposed to hear sound, which I didn’t.
Lack of an error message is a pain to work with, so I couldn’t find any way to fix it. I went through the guide several times, it didn’t get fixed. I upgraded kernels and alsa tools, nothing helped. I asked on forums, no one knew.
So today I tried everything again, and then went and searched the alsa-user mailing list archives. And there I found the solution to my problem: switch a rather buried, nowhere-mentioned pref to change the output from digital to analog, since it can only do one at a time.
So hopefully this post will come up on google for anyone having the same problem as me. If you have a Soundblaster 2 Audigy (ZS (Platinum (Pro))), which uses the emu10k1 driver, and you’re not getting any sound, but you have no error messages either, and you’re sure everything’s turned on and unmuted and turned to a good volume, then scroll way over in your alsamixer preferences, and find the thing labelled “Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack”, and unmute it.