Fixing Tiger Lake audio on Thinkpad P15s with ALC257 codec

README.md

What this fixed for me

The default settings on my machine would populate pavucontrol and alsamixer with the correct audio sources and sinks, but playing audio would not actually output sound (however, the microphone input would respond properly and record audio). Setting the snd-intel-dspcfg.dsp_driver=1 kernel argument to force the legacy snd_hda_intel driver would allow speakers to work, but this would break the microphone.

Procedure

Hopefully this saves someone else some time - this system is on Ubuntu 22.04. Ensure firmware-sof-signed is installed along with linux-firmware.

1. Set ALSA module settings:

   $ echo "options snd-hda-intel model=laptop-dmic" >> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

2. Set kernel flags: open /etc/default/grub or equivalent and set

   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="snd-intel-dspcfg.dsp_driver=3"

   to force SOP drivers. Then

   $ sudo update-grub && systemctl reboot

3. You should now observe

   $ inxi -A
   Audio:
      Device-1: Intel Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Audio
       driver: sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl
      Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.15.0-37-generic running: yes
      Sound Server-2: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes

   and audio (both input and output) should work.

See also

Note that none of the following directly fixed my issue.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1146748-start-0.html

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8667066.html?sid=7143695658a5406b75f89500bc3346e8

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=314511

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=254580