Hello,

I got some VAIO laptop using centrino technology,
curently everything seems to be detected and work out of the box
without any trouble except sound card weirdness.

the card seems to be detected as an auich standard sound card,
auich0 at pci0 dev 31 function 5: i82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4M) AC-97 Audio
auich0: interrupting at irq 9
auich0: ac97: Analog Devices AD1981B codec; headphone, 20 bit DAC, no 3D 
stereo
auich0: ac97: ext id 601<AC97_22,AMAP,VRA>
auich0: measured ac97 link rate at 48001 Hz, will use 48000 Hz
audio0 at auich0: full duplex, mmap, independent

no error message, nothing except that no sound (may be very very very 
very low) get out of the speaker, aumix or diferent mixer doesn't 
complain about it, they allow me to change various mixer standard 
settings without any problem, but still no sound (and yes i have checked 
all possible settings in mixerctl, audioctl and so on, at least i did 
those i've seen about in manpages and different webpages over the net).

by curiosity i went to look if some "linux guy" had any trouble/solution 
of the same kind on this laptop series (VAOI S1XP), looking into some 
other guy pages installing linux on it 
(http://www.hadess.net/vaio.php3), i've seen this :

[...]
Sound
Works with the snd-intel8x0 driver, after having disabled the external 
amplifier:
amixer set 'External Amplifier' mute
A bug has been filed to see this problem fixed in ALSA directly.
[...]

Does somebody got any ideas on what is this "external amplifier" setting 
?, which is either "not called the same", either non existant setting in 
mixerctl/audioctl ?!

Hope somebody can enlighten me,
(I will do more reasearch, and if i find out it will be posted here.)

Best Regards,
Eric.