Sound comes out of the built-in speakers correctly. Plug headphones into the 3.5 mm jack and there is nothing — the headphones work on another device, and the system does not obviously complain.
Sometimes the volume control appears to affect nothing when they are plugged in.
Is this a hardware fault, a driver problem, or a configuration one? I would like to know how to tell them apart before opening anything.
To rule hardware in or out, two quick tests.
Wiggle the plug while something is playing. A crackle, or sound appearing briefly, means a mechanical problem — a worn jack, or debris. Jacks fill with pocket lint remarkably fast, and a wooden toothpick and compressed air fixes a surprising share of "dead" headphone sockets.
Boot something else. A live USB system, or another operating system if the machine dual boots. Working there means the hardware is fine and the problem is entirely software on the original system. That single test saves a lot of guessing and takes ten minutes.
If it is silent everywhere, including in firmware beeps and in another operating system, then it is the jack or the board.
Almost always configuration, and the reason is a piece of hardware behaviour people do not know about: one physical jack is often several possible outputs, and something has to choose.
Modern audio chips have a small number of internal converters wired to a switching matrix. The jack can be a headphone output, a line output, or on many machines a microphone input, and the driver picks based on what it thinks was plugged in. That guess is what fails.
So the diagnostic order is:
One thing worth knowing on laptops: some models use a combined headset jack that expects a four-conductor plug.
Plug in a three-conductor pair of headphones and it can behave oddly — one channel, no sound, or the machine deciding a microphone was connected. It is not a fault, it is the connector expecting a different plug.
A cheap splitter or adapter resolves it, and it is worth checking the machine's specification before concluding anything is broken.
@audio_azra · 20h ago
That second volume control deserves its own paragraph because of how often it is the answer.
On Linux,
alsamixershows every control the chip exposes, including ones the desktop mixer hides. Press F6 to pick the card, then look for anything named for headphones, front, or automatic mute — and check forMMunder a control, which means muted. Unmute withm.There is often a control called something like "Auto-Mute Mode", which silences the speakers when headphones are inserted. If that is misconfigured you can get the reverse of your problem, and toggling it sometimes fixes the detection entirely.
On Windows the equivalent is checking the playback devices list with "show disabled devices" turned on, since a disabled output looks exactly like an absent one.
Between those two, the great majority of these are solved without touching a driver.
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