I had an issue where my Thinkpad X201's speakers would work intermittently; They'd work for a minute or two before unexpectedly muting themselves. Sometimes by fiddling with the muting feature in alsamixer I could get them to work again, but only for a couple of seconds at best, and I couldn't find anything in logs. The problem however was present on multiple OS, so I started to think it was hardware related.
Fortunately, before blindly buying and trying another sound card, I stumbled upon this post:
https://www.spaceflakes.de/3128/thinkpad-t410t510-lautsprecherausfall-beheben/
I had almost the same Conexant sound card in my X201, so I figured it was most likely the same problem! I opened my laptop, and for lack of having a thermal camera, lightly touched the suspicious chip at about the red 'X' below
