Sometimes it is a huzzle to get around with a new soundcard, or getting a mix to work, i give some hints on getting information about devices and system here:

First watch should be allways alsamixer as a simple source to solve most mute problems, and get a view what is aviable:

As we use pulseaudio by default choose the right tools to see if there is a problem:

• GTK GUIs: paprefs and pavucontrol

• KF5 plasma applet: kmix and plasma-pa
• Xfce4 plugin: xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin, pa-applet-git

Configs are here: ~/.config/pulse/ and can easy reset by removing the files and relogin to DE (rm -R ~/.config/pulse/) as normal user !

pulseaudio is started as per-user service:

So as normal user:

systemctl --user status pulseaudio.socket

systemctl --user restart pulseaudio.socket

systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket

systemctl --user start pulseaudio.socket

Will give status / restart /stop and start for pulseaudio…

Auto-Mute:

Mode is may be enabled, this is causing such problems at the moment for multiple users:

It can be disabled using alsamixer.

See http://superuser.com/questions/431079/how-to-disable-auto-mute-mode for more.

To save your current settings as the default options, run **alsactl store** as root.

HDA Analyzer to get direct hardware access to hda_intel cards:

This tool allows change the HDA codec setting using direct hardware access
bypassing driver’s mixer layer.

To learn more about HDA (High Definition Audio), see
http://www.intel.com/standards/hdaudio/ for more details.
Please, if you find how your codec work, send this information to alsa-devel
mailing list – http://www.alsa-project.org .

wget -O run.py http://www.alsa-project.org/hda-analyzer.py

change python to python2 in the last line of the skript that it looks like this:

aha my python skills are lame in a way 
i forget i need to change last line inside run.py to python2 like this:

os.system("python2 %s" % TMPDIR + '/' + FILES[0] + ' ' + ' '.join(sys.argv[1:]))

and run it:

sudo python2 run.py

you can also use my download here with the fixed skript out of the box like this:

wget http://www.kamprad.net/Downloads/hda-analyzer.py && sudo python2 hda-analyzer.py

https://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/HDA_Analyzer

Some more tools:

wget http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh && sh alsa-info.sh

will give you advanced info about the Soundcards + system and outputs an URL where the info is posted.

pactl list sinks

Lists your active devices.

<code class="EnlighterJSRAW">speaker-test -c 6</code>

To test all aviable speakers on a system with 6 here, number needs to be changed to what you have .