iMac Ubuntu — no sound audio issues

therealbryanho
2 min readMar 19, 2024

Ubuntu is a lovely operation system and stable mostly. But the worse feeling comes when Ubuntu is installed on an iMac and the supposedly wonderful speakers aren’t working. There are plenty of complains on this online, many technical solutions that require installation of different software, different configuration files, etc. I’ve tried them all. Spent 4–5 days. And then I found it. The answer was simple. I don’t know why there were so many messy solutions out there. So here, is my simple answer to fix the sound issue on iMac Ubuntu.

  1. Run alsamixer in terminal

2. See which chip you have. Make a note of it. Press Esc key to exit.

3. Run this command “sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf”. Some warnings appear. But it’s fine. alsa-base.conf is now open in an editor window.

4. In your web browser, navigate to https://lxr.linux.no/linux+v3.2.19/Documentation/sound/alsa/HD-Audio-Models.txt and search for your chip. In my case, I did a search in the file for cs4206.

5. Back at the alsa-base.conf editor window, scroll all the way down. You will see “options snd-hda-intel”. Here is where we will make 1 change to the “model” based on your chip, in my case, “imac27”. Click Save.

6. Reboot the computer. Enjoy sound on your iMac.

This solution should work for any Linux distribution. This was the article that helped me figure it out. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto

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