Internal microphone not working on a T420s

Question

Hi,
I have been googling a lot and reading the forums, but nothing seems to help. No matter what I do, the internal mic does not record any sound. I tried with pulseaudio and without, various options in alsa-base.conf, all kinds of settings in alsamixer, trying audacity, trying hda-analyzer etc. Nothing seems to work. But I know the hardware is not the problem because it worked  when I tried Windows 7. The problem is not that my recording volume is very low, it is not recording anything at all.
I at a loss how to debug this. Can anybody give me a pointer which  steps I need to take to find out where exactly the problem lies?
Cheers
Last edited by akuschki (2012-03-18 12:41:01)

Answer 1

Sorry for replying late, I have sunk so much time into this issue already that sometimes I need to take a break to keep my sanity. According to https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ad … are_loaded, the following output indicates that it is not a problem with the snd modules, right?
a ~$ lsmod | grep '^snd' | column -t
snd_hda_codec_conexant  46938  1
snd_hda_intel           23631  2
snd_hda_codec           92950  2   snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec_conexant
snd_hwdep               6389   1   snd_hda_codec
snd_pcm                 74812  2   snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel
snd_page_alloc          7153   2   snd_pcm,snd_hda_intel
snd_timer               19544  1   snd_pcm
snd                     59858  11  thinkpad_acpi,snd_timer,snd_pcm,snd_hwdep,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec_conexant
a ~$ ll /dev/snd
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root       80 Apr 14 13:18 by-path
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116,  6 Apr 14 13:18 controlC0
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116,  2 Apr 14 13:18 controlC29
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116,  5 Apr 14 13:18 hwC0D0
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116,  4 Apr 14 13:39 pcmC0D0c
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116,  3 Apr 14 13:36 pcmC0D0p
crw-rw----  1 root audio 116,  1 Apr 14 13:18 seq
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 33 Apr 14 13:18 timer
Last edited by akuschki (2012-04-14 11:46:19)