| VIA8233 audio: sound too quiet, Master doesn't work
All the time I've had my current machine, the onboard VT8233 sound hasn't worked properly. It doesn't give the typical weird noises or inaudible/nonexistant output; instead it gives me two lesser problems which are annoyingly hard to track down.
1. The "Master" channel doesn't do anything at all. Muting it doesn't mute the sound, and changing its volume is not reflected by any changes in sound volume. Now, you might say, "Oh, that's easy, use ac97_quirk". Well, I have tried that, but it doesn't work. You see, VT8233 is supposed to have a "Headphone" channel, but mine has "Surround" instead, and Surround doesn't have an adjustable volume - it's got two sides, which are either muted or unmuted, no volume adjustment available, and as it happens it does nothing when I mute or unmute either side. Using ac97_quirk swaps that for the Master channel, which, as one might, doesn't do a whole lot.
2. Sound volume is way too low. Not inaudible, but, with all the channels at maximum, it's about half the volume I get from my SB128 at normal settings (Master @ 82, PCM@ 90). I figure that a working Master channel might help rectify that, though I'm not really sure.
So far I've tried tweaking ac97_quirk (no value helps) and dxs_support (again no help, though certain values increase the pitch of output for various applications). Also tried disabling APIC, after I noticed a post on another forum to the effect that that could cause problems. No luck so far. Can anyone give me some pointers? | 
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