After a recent reinstall of Manjaro (Summer 2021) on an Acer Chromebook 14 (aka Edgar, CB3-431) which has the embedded Intel Audio card chtrt5650, I discovered that I wasn’t getting any audio output from the speakers.

Sidenote: This Intel chtrt5650 is the most irritating Audio hardware I’ve ever come across and the only one I’ve ever had an issue with on Linux. Just to be clear, this is an issue with hardware and not Linux, there is something specific regarding the BIOS and initialization of the Audio hardware which causes this issue.

The below fix isn’t really a solution, but a workaround, but hopefully it will help someone out:

Workaround⌗

  1. Within a console (can be virtual) run “alsamixer”
    • I found no difference to running this as a normal user or sudo
  2. When the CLI alsamixer app starts up, press “F6” to select the target audio device “chtrt5650”
  3. Press the right arrow key until you get to “SPK MIXL DAC L1”, it will probably already be unmuted, however, mute it by pressing the “m” key and unmute it by pressing the “m” key again (this display of “00” should cycle from green background to black and vice-versa)
  4. Press the right arrow key a couple more times and perform the same actions as above on the following outputs:
    • “SPK MIXL DAC L2”
    • “SPK MIXR DAC L1”
    • “SPK MIXR DAC L2”

I don’t pretend to understand why, but the above appears to give the audio device a kick and it then works… until you restart!