[Solved] Dell Inspiron 620 HDA audio (Conexant) with fresh Sierra install

[iKarith]

Hey everyone, I have a Dell Inspiron 620 (which uses one of only a couple of Sandy Bridge H61 motherboards Dell actually uses in any system), and I'm finding that audio does not work. I understand the sound chip to be a Conexant that should be supported by default, but I get this helpful error periodically:

How does one go about debugging this? I installed the latest VoodooHDA with MultiBeast. Did I fail to install something I needed to maybe?

Help appreciated, I'm about as n00b as they come here, but I shall endeavor to acquire a clue quickly.

 

[P1LGRIM]

Help appreciated, I'm about as n00b as they come here, but I shall endeavor to acquire a clue quickly.

Read the 'sticky' guides first and be sure to comply with the Problem Reporting instructions or you will not get any help.

 

[iKarith]

I started with the sticky posts. I see: Realtek, Realtek, 200 series, Realtek, No audio after sleep for Realtek, Before you install ... Realtek, MultiBeast audio failure (tried that one), Realtek, and Desktop only, which is not a guide--the Inspiron 620 is a desktop.

Pinned guides for audio are perhaps not the simplest and most n00b-friendly problem to solve, and it seems like all of the solutions tend toward Realtek.

As I am led to understand I have Connexant audio in this system, and I can't seem to find a guide that isn't for Realtek. I did find one post in Mavericks desktop support related to the Inspiron 620 that has maybe old versions of the kexts I should install posted by loluwotm8
loluwotm8 but I am not sure what to do with those yet other than possibly drop them on my desktop and run kextbeast like I had to for network. Perhaps one of the other guides will indicate what I properly ought to do in order to "clean up previous attempts" (again as was necessary for ethernet on this machine), but I didn't spend a whole lot of time with Realtek guides as I don't have a Realtek sound chip as I said.

 

[P1LGRIM]

I don't have a Realtek sound chip as I said.[/SIZE]

Maybe try VoodooHDA then.

 

[iKarith]

(Sorry mods, text change was not intended there with the borked link, and it does not appear that I can edit to fix it—I did just now figure out how to turn OFF the wysiwyg editor. I'm legally blind and just zooming in the screen to stupid levels of bigness, didn't notice the text got a little bigger.)

 

[iKarith]

VoodooHDA was the problem--MultiBeast's installation was not working. Installing the SF package didn't fix it because it lives in /S/L/E rather than /L/E, so there was a working copy and a non-working. Remove the one from /L/E, sudo kextcache -i /, and reboot. VoodooHDA's skeuomorphic volume control is far less intuitive than probably intended, but eventually I got all the levels set so that keyboard volume keys did what I expected with reasonable audio levels.

Thanks for confirming that VoodooHDA was probably the solution! It was!