Monday, March 29, 2021

Re: Microphone not working on Gen8 ThinkPad X1 Carbon

On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 4:17 AM Alexandre Ratchov <alex@caoua.org> wrote:

> in short, on these machines, the microphone is not connected to the HD
> audio codec (exposed by the azalia driver), but to another "intel
> smart sound technology" chip for which OpenBSD has no driver.
>
> If gen8 are the same, until this get fixed, I'd suggest using a
> *full-duplex* USB audio headset for audio-conferencing.
>

Thanks for the hints, Alexandre. Your TRRS comment in particular got my
creative juices flowing.

I have a ham radio handheld microphone with a TRRS plug on it, and while
it's wired COMPLETELY wrong for a TRRS headset, plugging it in and yelling
into the speaker while recording with Audacity shows audio levels on the VU
meter, and I can play it back properly. This tells me the Gen8 Thinkpads
have a TRRS jack and that the azalia(5) driver microphone input is using
the back-most contact as microphone input regardless if a device is plugged
in (hence the very low level of static-looking movement on the VU meters in
Audacity when trying to record earlier). I am positive I can just go get a
cheap TRRS headset and I should be good to go.

I do also have a broken-in-two Turtle Beach gaming headset my wife used to
use, with a USB sound device built-in. Plugging that in and frobbing
sndiod's flags per the Multimedia FAQ, I was also able to record audio from
snd/1 handily, so I now have two quite reasonable options for all my
streaming/recording/conferencing needs. I'd love to help test patches for
the integrated mic should someone attempt to tackle it. I'm not much of a
software developer, though, and don't have much to add aside from testing.

Ty,
--ax0n

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