Comment 145 for bug 1851518

1) I am so glad the brightness fix worked for you! At least I can feel like I've accomplished something ;)

2) Thanks so much for your detailed qemu information. I think I am going to tackle that next, and it should help (especially since compiling the pre-customized qemu was giving me trouble...your method sounds better, cause I can download what should be the latest qemu, and just patch it before compiling).

So, an update: A bit of very good news and very bad news. I was gearing up to do qemu last night, but decided to try "one last thing". I came across this post here:
    https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216023

In it, someone else with a 950QED had done the whole Qemu thing, and came up with a different set of verbs. Very long (3500 verbs), not cut down very well. So I decided to try them. Boom, sound! Finally (It scared the hell out of me, after all this trying and failing). But: Sound in the left speaker, in the right speaker extremely loud static. Rebooted, same thing. Then, while the static was playing, I went to write myself a note about the results, and must have waited too long, because in the meantime, I smelled something very faint coming from the computer, then the static volume starts reducing slowly bit by bit to nothing. And from that point on, no sound in the right speaker in linux. In windows, even after shutdown, very faint volume from the right (It's almost like a blew an amp or something? ..maybe there is an amplified speaker that linux is calling, that's dead, and windows is calling the unamplified one, hence the quiet sound? ...but i don't know how this stuff works. Also, in certain configurations, I can in linux only get that loud static on the right to pop in for 1sec before going quiet again (by re-running the verbs)... so that cuts against the theory that I blew something, even though windows sound is still permanently affected, very weird)

So my computer is still within the return window for a few days, but I don't wanna get a new one and just repeat the same mistake. It's possible it's not that anything blew, but just i'm still missing some weird initialization/reset verbs or something? Hence why I think I will still see what happens on qemu, on a fresh windows install (and even better that you say it will use a different generic sound driver, so i can see what happens). This whole thing has made me realize, as I boot into linux/windows,reboot, etc., that the soundcard holds state between reboots much more than I ever thought possible I.e., once the verbs are sent, they don't need to be sent again unless I launch windows, or shutdown completely. And all this seems independent of whether I do those other steps (alsa.conf, etc.) or not, it just seems about getting those magic initialization verbs.