headphones no audio

I am really rather confused. After a while I booted into this system again (haven't booted it since). I upgraded (freebsd-update and pkg upgrade) and it suddenly works. I'd guess it's the packages (see upgrade log below), but then it shouldn't affect a test like 'cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp', should it?

I see alsa-plugins, but I am not sure whether or not these affect the dsp device on FreeBSD.

The pinout didn't change from the original, no device hints are active. Everything is back to default.

Code:
pkg upgraded: 1.9.3 -> 1.9.4
gettext-runtime upgraded: 0.19.8.1 -> 0.19.8.1_1
expat upgraded: 2.2.0 -> 2.2.0_1
xcb-util upgraded: 0.4.0_1,1 -> 0.4.0_2,1
pcre upgraded: 8.39 -> 8.39_1
libiconv upgraded: 1.14_9 -> 1.14_10
icu upgraded: 58.1,1 -> 58.2,1
dbus upgraded: 1.8.20 -> 1.10.12
tiff upgraded: 4.0.7 -> 4.0.7_1
harfbuzz upgraded: 1.3.3_1 -> 1.3.4
gnutls upgraded: 3.4.16 -> 3.4.17
py27-setuptools27 upgraded: 28.1.0 -> 28.8.0
libxslt upgraded: 1.1.29 -> 1.1.29_1
libogg upgraded: 1.3.2_1,4 -> 1.3.2_2,4
libIDL upgraded: 0.8.14_2 -> 0.8.14_3
libvorbis upgraded: 1.3.5,3 -> 1.3.5_1,3
argyllcms upgraded: 1.7.0_2 -> 1.9.2
ORBit2 upgraded: 2.14.19_1 -> 2.14.19_2
libx264 upgraded: 0.148.2708_1 -> 0.148.2708_2
libtheora upgraded: 1.1.1_6 -> 1.1.1_7
colord upgraded: 1.2.11_1 -> 1.2.12
policykit-gnome upgraded: 0.9.2_7 -> 0.9.2_8
nss upgraded: 3.27.1_1 -> 3.27.2
libopenraw upgraded: 0.0.9_4 -> 0.1.0
libnotify upgraded: 0.7.6_1 -> 0.7.6_2
hunspell upgraded: 1.3.3 -> 1.5.4
ffmpeg upgraded: 2.8.8_8,1 -> 3.2.2_1,1
desktop-file-utils upgraded: 0.22_3 -> 0.22_4
alsa-plugins upgraded: 1.1.1 -> 1.1.1_1
zsh upgraded: 5.2_4 -> 5.3
xwininfo upgraded: 1.1.3_1 -> 1.1.3_2
xfce4-tumbler upgraded: 0.1.31_3 -> 0.1.31_4
xclock upgraded: 1.0.7_1 -> 1.0.7_2
vim-lite upgraded: 8.0.0094 -> 8.0.0130
unique upgraded: 1.1.6_6 -> 1.1.6_7
telepathy-glib upgraded: 0.24.1 -> 0.24.1_1
popt upgraded: 1.16_1 -> 1.16_2
p7zip upgraded: 15.14_1 -> 16.02
libwnck upgraded: 2.30.7 -> 2.30.7_1
libssh2 upgraded: 1.7.0,2 -> 1.8.0,2
libslang2 upgraded: 2.3.0 -> 2.3.1
libmng upgraded: 1.0.10_2 -> 1.0.10_3
gtksourceview2 upgraded: 2.10.5_4 -> 2.10.5_5
gstreamer-plugins-good upgraded: 0.10.31_2,3 -> 0.10.31_3,3
gnome-mount upgraded: 0.8_12 -> 0.8_13
gegl upgraded: 0.2.0_16 -> 0.2.0_19
firefox upgraded: 50.0.1,1 -> 50.1.0_4,1
enchant upgraded: 1.6.0_5 -> 1.6.0_6
curl upgraded: 7.51.0_1 -> 7.51.0_3
 
I speculate gstreamer may have something to do with it although I really do not know how.

We have the exact same model laptop and this issue has been eating me for the entire day. I had latest 11.0 update and all packages were up to date. I looked through your packages, installed gstreamer with plugins and suddenly it all worked.
 
Something that is strange, even though I haven't seen a pattern yet is that it might be related to reboots, also of the Linux based OS. Do you also dual boot? I can't seem to reproduce it, but sounds keeps working if it does when I don't reboot into the other OS.

I hope this question doesn't seem too odd, but could it be that there is some state stored inside the audio chip? Like something that is meant to be configured by a driver? Of course that seems a bit like pulling ideas out of thin air, but I fail to explain it really, as I didn't change any configuration ever since the tests I made and today was the first time I had this appear again after rebooting from the Linux system.

Very odd behavior.

The only other explanation I'd have is a race condition of some sort.

The pinout btw. looks the same and always remains the original.

EDIT: I don't think it's gstreamer, because that shozldn't affect piping to /dev/dsp*
EDIT2: Also did sound work without gstreamer, when you didn't have headphones plugged in?
EDIT3: There appears to be some kind of state. On some tests I noticed that both on Linux and BSD there are differences after bootup from a completely halted system vs reboot for example (Linux never loses output completely, but for example without any changes has a rustling, from boot onwards). So looks like power affects it. That would explain the "suddenly working" part despite any changes. Do you see that too sakhmatd? Maybe some driver problem?
We don't seem to be the only ones having problems with that: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/50381/
EDIT4: Could this be related? https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2012-October/246013.html
 
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Update. So I have now seen it multiple times that booting into another OS in between causes the issue.

Another thing the repeatedly happens is that igain (or its Linux equivalent) gets muted/unmuted. This is odd[1], but maybe means it's related to this. Whenever my igain comes up unmuted the headphones work, when they come up muted they don't. The pinout remains the same though. Raising the volume on igain doesn't change anything. I usually have to turn it off, because I otherwise hear sound from the internal mic on the headphones/speakers.

Speakers themselves, always work.

[1] or maybe it's not. I don't know enough about audio and how drivers work.

EDIT: Okay, verified that it always gets fixed by powering off rather than rebooting. Maybe something I could do to simulate that from within the OS? Then this could be done by the driver to have the same behavior all the time?

By the way, that also means that it's not related to packages, which would have been strange since piping to /dev/dsp didn't work either. So if you wanna make sure it's the same, do that instead of using some application that might need libraries, etc.
 
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