M2A-VM Audio Problems

Hello all...

I've been building a system around an Asus M2A-VM motherboard, and so far it
has gone very well with no major problems.

Tonight, I installed the operating system (Windows XP x64 edition) and that
went well as soon as I had all of the drivers installed. All of the hardware
seemed to be working fine, so I hooked up some cheap speakers and put on
some music...only I got nothing!

After some careful examination, it turns out that there is really audio
playing--but you can only hear it if you put your ear right up to the
speaker with its volume turned all the way up. This is true at both the rear
audio line out jacks as well as the HD Audio front panel "headphone" jack.

Windows is fully up to date and I used all the latest drivers from the ASUS
web site when setting up the hardware. In addition to that, I also checked
the following:

1. The mixer settings, which appear to be correct
2. The "mute audio when something is connected to the front panel" setting
is unchecked. Nothing's connected to the front panel anyway.
3. The BIOS has been configured to know that the front panel is wired for HD
Audio, and not the older AC'97. I double checked the connectors in the case,
just to be sure I had the right header plugged in, and I did.
4. There are no problems in Device Manager.
5. The Realtek/ASUS HD Audio Control Panel applet knows when the speakers
are plugged in or unplugged, and reports either event as soon as it occurs.
6. I tried disconnecting the front panel audio cable entirely, in case it
was causing problems. This did not produce an improvement.
7. All sources are affected equally--MIDI files don't play any differently
than waveform audio. I don't know about the microphone and line inputs.

And finally, I booted up a live CD-based copy of Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit. The
same audio behavior was noted--audio was present but even with the mixer
settings maxed out barely any audio could be heard.

The speakers are cheap but work fine when connected to an iPod or a nearby
desktop computer.

I'm guessing at this point that something is wrong with the audio hardware
itself, and that the best solution is going to be the use of a sound card.
(I've never been that huge of an integrated audio fan, but that's another
story.) Still, I hate to use up another one of the (few) PCI slots on this
board.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

William

William R. Walsh wrote:
> Hello all...
>
> I've been building a system around an Asus M2A-VM motherboard, and so far it
> has gone very well with no major problems.
>
> Tonight, I installed the operating system (Windows XP x64 edition) and that
> went well as soon as I had all of the drivers installed. All of the hardware
> seemed to be working fine, so I hooked up some cheap speakers and put on
> some music...only I got nothing!
>
> After some careful examination, it turns out that there is really audio
> playing--but you can only hear it if you put your ear right up to the
> speaker with its volume turned all the way up. This is true at both the rear
> audio line out jacks as well as the HD Audio front panel "headphone" jack.
>
> Windows is fully up to date and I used all the latest drivers from the ASUS
> web site when setting up the hardware. In addition to that, I also checked
> the following:
>
> 1. The mixer settings, which appear to be correct
> 2. The "mute audio when something is connected to the front panel" setting
> is unchecked. Nothing's connected to the front panel anyway.
> 3. The BIOS has been configured to know that the front panel is wired for HD
> Audio, and not the older AC'97. I double checked the connectors in the case,
> just to be sure I had the right header plugged in, and I did.
> 4. There are no problems in Device Manager.
> 5. The Realtek/ASUS HD Audio Control Panel applet knows when the speakers
> are plugged in or unplugged, and reports either event as soon as it occurs.
> 6. I tried disconnecting the front panel audio cable entirely, in case it
> was causing problems. This did not produce an improvement.
> 7. All sources are affected equally--MIDI files don't play any differently
> than waveform audio. I don't know about the microphone and line inputs.
>
> And finally, I booted up a live CD-based copy of Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit. The
> same audio behavior was noted--audio was present but even with the mixer
> settings maxed out barely any audio could be heard.
>
> The speakers are cheap but work fine when connected to an iPod or a nearby
> desktop computer.
>
> I'm guessing at this point that something is wrong with the audio hardware
> itself, and that the best solution is going to be the use of a sound card.
> (I've never been that huge of an integrated audio fan, but that's another
> story.) Still, I hate to use up another one of the (few) PCI slots on this
> board.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated!
>
> William
>

Is the control panel set for "two speaker" mode ?

Have you tested with the green Lineout jack on the back of the computer ?

In terms of the hardware, audio is pretty simple. The chip receives power from
a small regulator next to it. All the analog inputs and outputs are AC coupled. If
there was DC leakage, sometimes that can upset the bias on an audio device
you're connected to.

I use a multimeter, to prove my audio is working somewhere close to spec.
I use a copy of Audacity, and send out a sine wave tone. I have a 1/8"
male to male audio cable. I use a multimeter set to AC volts, to check the
output level. I expect to see a bit over 1 volt RMS. I use an audio frequency
that I expect the multimeter isn't going to have a problem seeing. 440Hz shouldn't
cause a problem for my multimeter.

I can't tell from your problem description, what exactly is broken. If the
regulator was producing too low a voltage, that might cause the output
level to be abnormally low. But it could just as easily be, a software
problem, where one of the level widgets isn't set up properly. While I've
read the HDaudio spec, and could see some of the rationale, I don't think
I could use the information provided in a datasheet, to debug what is going
on. They've dispensed with a "hardware oriented" description, so you can't
really do a "register dump" to figure out what is wrong.

If your description had included things like "my left works but my right doesn't",
or "the headphone level is different than the Lineout level", then it might be possible
to blame a particular output pin on the chip as being defective. But as long as
all of them are doing it, and the sound is not distorted (clipped), then the
easiest explanation is a level setting is wrong somewhere. It could be as
simple as the driver having the wrong configuration information. In which case,
you should scan the vip.asus.com forum for the board, and see if anyone else has
a problem.

http://vip.asus.com/forum/topic.aspx...Language=en-us

I notice in the forum, there is audio over HDMI capability, so the RealTek
driver could be controlling two audio sources. You'd want the Sound control
panel to select the motherboard HDaudio, rather than the ATI HDaudio over
HDMI. I presume that means there is a codec inside the 690G, as well as the
ALC883 on the corner of the motherboard.

Paul

Hi!

> Is the control panel set for "two speaker" mode ?

Yes, it appears to default to that choice. In any event, I did try changing
it to something else and then changing it back.

> Have you tested with the green Lineout jack on the back of the computer ?

Yes. I tried that jack, choosing both "Line Out" and "Headphone" settings
(separately, not both at the same time). Headphone is a little bit louder
than line out. I noticed no other apparent difference.

And I did something else--the ALC883 supposedly offers "jack retasking"
capability, where any jack can be used for any purpose. I tried, and it
would let me redirect audio out to both the line-out and microphone jacks.
The effect was the same once the selection had been changed from the Realtek
mixing panel to reflect the new purpose of the jack in question--audio going
to the speakers was extremely quiet.

Finally, I did try another pair of speakers and even some cheap headphones.
Those also failed to work.

> In terms of the hardware, audio is pretty simple. The chip receives power
> from a small regulator next to it. All the analog inputs and outputs are
> AC
> coupled. If there was DC leakage, sometimes that can upset the bias on
> an audio device you're connected to.

I'd really expect other malfunctions if the IC's power supply was messed up.
It seems to operate fine in every other regard.

> I can't tell from your problem description, what exactly is broken. If the
> regulator was producing too low a voltage, that might cause the output
> level to be abnormally low. But it could just as easily be, a software
> problem, where one of the level widgets isn't set up properly.

I sure tried every software and mixer setting I could find, and I even tried
maxing them all out. Some of them (the ones you'd expect, like the master
volume control or the slider for the source being played) did affect the
sound, but even at their highest setting, the audio was weak.

> If your description had included things like "my left works but my right
> doesn't",
> or "the headphone level is different than the Lineout level", then it
> might be
> possible to blame a particular output pin on the chip as being defective.
> But
> as long as all of them are doing it, and the sound is not distorted
> (clipped),
> then the easiest explanation is a level setting is wrong somewhere.

The output is quiet but not distorted. Left and right channels are affected
equally--well, *maybe* the right is a little louder than the left, but who
knows. The difference is minimal and could be attributed to the speakers or
even the mixing of the sounds being played back.

> It could be as simple as the driver having the wrong configuration
> information. In which case, you should scan the vip.asus.com forum for
> the board, and see if anyone else has a problem.

I'll definitely check into that, although I wouldn't expect that two
different operating systems could both have the wrong idea about how to set
up and use the sound hardware.

> I notice in the forum, there is audio over HDMI capability, so the RealTek
> driver could be controlling two audio sources.

I don't have the HDMI version of the board. I suppose that the majority of
the circuitry (apart from the PCIe header) is there anyway, but nowhere did
I see anything referring to ATI HDMI audio. There's only the one choice, and
that is the Realtek audio.

I don't think it is looking good for the Realtek codec at this point.

It's probably too late to return the board for an RMA, as I've had it for a
while now (since 2007 or so) as I've been saving up to build a system around
it. I'll have to see what the manual says about a warranty or replacement if
nothing else results in a fix.

William

Well, I've done some more testing.

Recording from the microphone works, but it was distorted since I had the
MIC mixer turned up too high.

Playing a source through LINE IN also works, and there is some amplification
taking place, as the source is louder when played through the sound system
with the LINE IN mixer turned up than when it is directly attached to the
speakers, which are amplified.

I tried another, expensive set of speakers and found them to work no better
than the cheap set.

When played back, the recordings I made from the microphone were nearly
inaudible--so I played them back from a different computer, where they were
more than loud enough. To me, this suggests the microphone circuit is OK.

It seems like the wave output is messed up all by itself. (MIDI happens in
software and therefore probably goes out to the codec as wave data.) How
that happens I cannot say, but it's true under both Windows and Linux.

(And to be reasonably sure that messed up settings in one OS were not
affecting the other, I powered the system completely down between boot-up
attempts--even going so far as to kill standby power going into the system.)

The ASUS forums had a few people who had problems getting the drivers to
install, and a few more who suggested that the Realtek drivers are of poor
quality and don't always install or uninstall properly.

I guess it is time to see what ASUS says about replacing the board. And
failing that, I guess I'll spend the last free PCI slot for a SoundBlaster
Live! card.

William

thanks for the info man thanks buddy.