On Sun, 3 Jun 2018, Mac wrote:

      On Sun, 3 Jun 2018, Mac wrote:

            As I said, I checked it, nothing is muted and all are at
            100%.

            What am I missing...


      Ok, simple things first. have you verified with meterbridge or
      something similar, that there is audio (needle movement) going to the
      system output ports? Have you tried connecting your audio source to
      all audio outputs?


Yes, used meter bridge, yes there was movement.

Cool, that narrows things down anyway. So there is sound in Jackdbus, but the output is not getting to the hardware.

That said, since my last post I booted to the original os on this laptop (it is a
system76, so it came with vanilla Ubuntu) the speakers worked.
(Since it was vanilla, I had no jack, etc. to play with...and has been so long I
had to log in as guest, so didn't attempt to install anything.)

So, I rebooted to UbStudio. Now I can start jack and get sound from the speakers,
but it's distorted.

              device: ALSA device name (str:set:hw:0:hw:HD2)
             capture: Provide capture ports.  Optionally set device
(str:set:none:hw:PCH)
            playback: Provide playback ports.  Optionally set device
(str:set:none:hw:PCH,0)
                rate: Sample rate (uint:set:48000:44100)
              period: Frames per period (uint:set:1024:64)

It looks to me that whatever jackd has saved needs to be cleared out.

jack_control ds alsa dps capture none dps playback none
jack_control dps device hw:0  dps rate 44100 dps period 128 dps nperiods 2 start

See if that works. The first line is the important one. So long as capture and playback are set separately, device doesn't seem to take effect (for me anyway). In any case you have three different devices in there and one would probably work better.

You may have to replace the hw:0 with something better (hw:0 is probably hw:PCH). I don't know what HD2 is, but if you have all external audio unplugged I don't think it should be there.