Audio issues on Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H

Issues & Assistance
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Hello,

I recently bought a Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H (Intel Ultra 9 275HX, RTX 5090). I’ve been trying to get the speakers working on Garuda, but they sound weird, I’d say muffled or drowned, as if missing bass / clarity. It sounds similar to when you hear some audio playing from some low quality phone earphones from far away. There’s also some weird crackling when changing the volume quickly. With the volume all the way turned up, I can also hear some faint static-ish noise. Headphones and Bluetooth audio work fine.

I tested and the issue also happens in CachyOS, Nobara, Ubuntu, and it probably happens in just about any other distro. In Windows 11 (bleh), audio works normal, as expected, with the latest drivers.

I got garuda-inxi and also recorded some audio so you guys can better understand the situation. I recorded on my phone with the exact same conditions, only changed the volume since 50% on Linux was barely audible, while 50% on Windows was very loud.

Links for sounds and logs are at the bottom of the post.


I can’t post garuda-inxi here because I would go over character limit.

What I’ve tried so far

I’ve tried a lot of stuff, mainly with the help of GPT. Yes, I know it’s a very bad idea. I first tried searching online myself, but none of the issues matched mine. Most were about audio not working at all / no output. I also tried following this guide GitHub - aenawi/lenovo-legion-linux-audio: A comprehensive guide for fixing audio issues on Lenovo Legion Pro 7 laptops running Linux (Fedora/Ubuntu). Includes step-by-step solutions for PipeWire configuration and driver setup. Tested on Fedora 41, community testing needed for Ubuntu. , also to no avail. Here is a very brief summary of what I’ve done:

  1. Confirmed hardware and codec:
    Realtek ALC287 detected via inxi -A and dmesg (ALC287: picked fixup for PCI SSID 17aa:0000).

  2. Checked PipeWire and WirePlumber:
    Both services active and running. PipeWire version 1.4.9.

  3. Tried model quirks for snd_hda_intel:
    lenovo-ideapad, lenovo-legion, alc287-lenovo-yoga, etc. — no audible improvement.

  4. Used hdajackretask to remap pins (0x14/0x17 → internal speakers).
    Changes applied and persisted, but audio quality didn’t change.

  5. Disabled loopback device and forced correct output sink through pw-metadata and blacklisting snd_aloop.

  6. Installed and switched to SOF (Sound Open Firmware) driver:

    sof-firmware  alsa-firmware  alsa-ucm-conf
options snd_intel_dspcfg dsp_driver=3
options snd_hda_intel dmic_detect=0

    After rebuilding initramfs, sof-hda-dsp driver is active (/proc/asound/cards shows sofhdadsp: sof-hda-dsp).

  7. Manually linked missing UCM2 profiles from thesofproject/alsa-ucm-conf:

    /usr/share/alsa/ucm2/sof-hda-dsp/
/usr/share/alsa/ucm2/skl_hda_dsp_generic/

    WirePlumber still falls back to stereo-fallback instead of loading the intended HiFi (ALC287 Analog / sof-hda-dsp) profile.

  8. Cleared WirePlumber caches, restarted services, and checked logs — no errors, but the HiFi profile still isn’t applied.

I should mention, the HiFi profile doesn’t appear in KDE Volume control thingie, and it doesn’t appear in pavucontrol either. When trying to apply from terminal / CLI, it doesn’t change, it just stays as “Stereo”.

Everything seems to work on Windows, so my relatively uninformed guess is that this is a Linux driver/config issue. I can provide any other logs as needed. Please let me know if this post doesn’t belong here, or if I should raise the issue elsewhere. I would love to somehow get audio working.

Many thanks in advance!

Links:
garuda-diag (garuda-inxi) : Garuda's PrivateBin
Folder containing dmesg, journalctl, and how the speakers sound on Linux vs Windows: LenovoLegionAudioDebugging – Google Drive