S/PDIF stopped working (ALC269)

Question

Hi,
I've came to my parents' house for christmass and wanted to play some HD movies from my laptop with S/PDIF.
I've got a Lenovo U330 with two cards:
Realtek ALC269
ATI HDMI (catalyst)
Kernel is 2.6.31 and alsa-lib is 1.0.21a.
Now, it DID work some time ago (a few months probably) when the S/PDIF settings was still called IEC958 in alsamixer. I just needed to ceck IEC958 to on in alsamixer and the digital signal (red laser) appeared out of my headphone socket. I even was able to put my normal PCM output through IEC958 thanks to "IEC958 Default PCM". Now it doesn't work (i.e. no signal) at all.
It appears that something was changed in the kernel or alsa that broke my config. For example, I don't remember seeing modules such as snd_hda_codec_realtek, it all used to be done with snd_hda_intel.
Now, I didn't require any special modprobe settings for snd_hda_intel before, it worked out of the box.
Any clues?

Answer 1

Don't know if it will help your situation but have you tried running:
~>>> iecset
Mode: consumer
Data: audio
Rate: 48000 Hz
Copyright: permitted
Emphasis: none
Category: digital signal mixer
Original: original
Clock: 1000 ppm
when iecset is run with no parameters it should output something like above. I remember I had a similar problem once where my mode got changed professional instead of consumer or something along those lines. anyway the result was no spdif output at all. Check iecset --help for switches.