Sound Troubles

I recently fixed the sound on my friend's new HP Pavillion dv4-1225dx. Once again, research on google and ubuntu forums (and openSUSE 's forums) was my only salvation. Apparently, many new sound cards have absolutely no standardized codecs. The basic steps were:

1. Install Ubuntu Intrepid (my friend had already done this)
2. Update alsa-libs to most recent stable version. This was higher than the
   
3. Edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base to include the specific codec type.
4. Make certain the volume was ALL the way up.

Alsa libs update was accomplished via soundcheck's script posted here on ubuntu forums. This compiled the newest alsa-libs, 1.0.18 in my case.

Further down in the post Temujin reposted model-specific information for the codec returned by the following command:

cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec

In my case it returned:

Codec: IDT 92HD71B7X
Codec: LSI ID 1040

Neither matched Temujin's list, but googling for 92HD71B7X led me to oldcpu's post on forums.opensuse.org. oldcpu pointed out that this was similar to STAC92HD71B* from Temujin's post. I added the line:

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m4-1

to the file

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

The model doesn't make sense (this is an HP computer) but the sound worked after reboot. Huzzah!