Sound Problems - Hardware Failure?

[XioXouS]

I originally posted my problem here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3044827.html#3044827 but decided that my problem was a little different.

My problem:
I've had a laptop for over a year now that has been running Gentoo and the alsa-drivers ebuild, most recently 1.0.10 with ALSA_CARDS="intel8x0", without any problems until just the other day, I think the 14th, when all of the sudden my sound wouldn't work anymore, no config changes that I can see or anything. The devices still shows up in lspci, the modules still load just fine, alsamixer has the necessities unmuted and at 100%, and aplay returns no error messages, yet there is no sound, not even static, coming through headphones or the laptop speakers.

Oddities:
There are multimedia keys on my laptop that are supposed to handle volume control, they've never worked with ACPI on before and its never bothered me. What they've done in the past is simply report in a little on-screen-display that the volume was muted, even though ALSA and OSS could both play music just fine. Now it has that same behavior when I first boot up, but after I load the modules it show that the volume is at 3 bars, about half way up, but that's all it does - you can't change it at all (that aspect hasn't changed). It may have done this months ago and I just didn't remember though.

My troubleshooting:
I've tried kernel module drivers and in-kernel drivers for several different kernels (archck-sources-2.6.15_p2, suspend2-sources-2.6.14-r7, and 2.6.14 sources from kernel.org), several different alsa-driver packages (1.0.7, 1.0.10_rc3, 1.0.10, 1.0.11_rc2), different module parameters on the snd_intel8x0 driver (enable=Y), and two Live-CD's to try and determine what the problem is. Always the same results. My only other thought is too try to load Windows on the machine and see if I can get any sound out of it that way. That would unfortunately mean a lot of work though, so does any one else have any other thoughts? So far I'm really thinking it is a hardware failure, but then why wouldn't it at least have some errors in dmesg? Thanks.

[feivelda]

Have you tried without the Generic Hotkey driver in the ACPI Support?
Have you tried to enable your vendor specific Laptop Extras, e.g. Asus/Medion, IBM, Toshiba, Sony ... ?
Else, I would say it seems like a hardware failure. Maybe something at the soundcard output is broken

[XioXouS]

Generic hotkey is off, haven't yet tried it, maybe I'll do that next, just for kicks.
It's a Gateway so no extras unfortunately.