Headphones not working, again on Ubuntu 20.04; Fix

So the last time I have encountered a sound issue on my office laptop, I was been able to make that rectified by restoring alsa controls as described here.

This time it didn't work out and it was a new issue. Because it was on the front panel. I never had any desktop casing that had working front panel audio and I really been looking forward to this new casing I bought for my old desktop and when the headphones connected to the front panel, the audio wasn't working right away. I was so disappointed and wasn't ready to give up just yet. After an enormous web search on stack forums and elsewhere, I found the reason and the solution.

The reason as I suspect is described here (1). And the solution is described here (2).

Since these answers are under CC-BY-SA license I will log them down here for my own notes with credits to the original authors as linked above.

So the problem was the headphone jack pin configuration. It has an extra band as it is described in the first link and it expects one band less. And also the extra band touches the other contacts and the sound card doesn't detect the headphone correctly or doesn't detect it at all.

So the solution was to force detect (or act as detected) what it should have detected in the first place. So in my case, it was Analogue Stereo Duplex. As you can see on the screenshot, it's not detected as it shows it's unplugged and unavailable. Fear not, it starts to work when this option is selected.

So to come up here, install pavucontrol if not installed already,

sudo apt install pavucontrol

Then fire up

pavucontrol

, go to the Configuration tab and then select Analogue Stereo Duplex, even though it says it's unplugged and unavailable.

Aaand the problem solved.

PS (a few days later): One more issue to fix. Saving pauvcontrol settings didn't work as desired probably because the profile I wanted is detected as unplugged and unavailable I guess. Still finding a solution.