Thomas George wrote: > I also wish alsa had a signal strength monitor. Maybe I should reinstall > pulseaudio.
This is not a bad idea as pulseaudio is designed to work on top of alsa and to make life easier. In pulseaudio you can control your input and output, perhaps it is worth looking in all tabs and selecting the appropriate input. In some cases the fallback must be active (icon on the right pressed) There are also ways to show level indication in alsa, but this is another topic. We asked you to control if channels in alsamixer are muted, you did not report on that regards