So I love my latitude 7490 Hackintosh, I can triple boot Ventura, Somona, and Sequoia, but the sound was never loud enough, and I would need to install eqMac to boost the max volume on all of my installs. Well I spent the day today creating a modified AppleALC driver with the help of AI, and it boosts the max volume by about 5db. Even audio content that was loud to begin with, does not clip or distort when using this kext, and it has been tested on two different machines. Requires the following boot-args to function: alcid=56 alcverbs=1 -alcdhost
https://github.com/maddog860/5db-Volume-Boost-Latitude-7490/releases/tag/Volume-Boost
This includes a writeup that explains what was figured out today, and how this approach can increase the max volume of other hackintoshes. Enjoy everyone, and feel free to post feedback. This post is not asking for help, just submitting my positive results with artificial assistance, and therefore should not break any rules.
The specific undocumented/poorly documented 7490 audio details established were:
- The codec is Realtek ALC256 / Dell ALC3246, vendor ID
0x10ec0256.
- The internal speaker pin is node
0x14.
- Its pin config is
0x90170110.
- That speaker pin routes to DAC node
0x02.
- The DAC/output amp capability came back as
0x00025757, corresponding roughly to a range from about −65 dB up to 0 dB.
- At 100% macOS volume, the DAC gain was already sitting at
0x57 on both channels, which is the top of that hardware range.
- The speaker EAPD was already enabled (
0x02), so there wasn't an obvious hidden “turn the speaker amp fully on” switch left unused.
- The codec also has a vendor processing node
0x20 exposing 91 coefficients (0x5b). One of those, coefficient 0x37, is associated in Linux codec work with Class-D amplifier control.
- The 7490’s internal amplifier is about 2 W per channel.