Strange AMD E-350-based system sound issue.

[Thetargos]

A friend of mine asked me to install Linux (Fedora specifically) on her new Vaio netbook computer, which sports the "new" E-350 Fusion chips from AMD. I had no issues setting up the computer other than installing the proprietary driver, out of the box everything seemed to be working splendid, wireless (which traditionally has been the Achilles' ankle for many Linux distributions on the mobile camp). After installing the AMD Catalyst driver, everything was perfect... Except for sound. Apparently the devices as such are very well supported through either the Catalyst driver and the ALSA drivers (even the HDMI output), however, as with my experiences with previous AMD-based products and sound, the volume seems to be too low, so much so that on the netbook's speakers is imperceptible and with earphones is hardly noticeable, even when both on alsamixer and Gnome sound manager the volume was maxed out... Is there a way to correct this? I'm pretty sure that the speakers ARE working (even the microphone detects input), however the volume is so low that it is impossible to hear. Might there be a way around this, to get the volume "audible"?

PS: All other AMD-based motherboards and notebooks I've worked with, the sole exception of my "main" Toshiba laptop (Turion X2 TL-58 based on the SB600), exhibit this very same problem with sound, being it too low.

[chithanh]

Probably some control is still muted or set to low volume. Candidates are:

Master
Front
Master Front
PCM
Headphones

[Thetargos]

Problem is that alsamixer does not exhibit any of those controls to be muted, and some are not even present. On my main laptop I have a variety of [playback] controls (Master, headphone, PCM, speaker, Beep). however on this one, these do not exist, plain and simple, only a few controls (Master, Beep and PCM, IIRC), and the offset by which they seem to be active is strange, as the sound is way TOO low.

It's been a while since I last mingled with ALSA magic on the comand-line and through lisp scripts. It's been almost four years since ALSA is such a stable state that I simply don't manage it from the command line, and since Pulse has been doing a terrific job on all my computers, I've hadn't had the need to

Anyway, this one is new... Maybe Michael might know a thing or two from the E-350 system he benchmarked. Then again, sound is such a difficult thing to "test"