If you have an intel sound card and you are concerned about battery life, probably you have seen this in the powetop output…

100.0%                      Device         Audio codec hwC0D0:

Conexant

After much duck-duck-ing around I found this enlightening comment on the lesswatt mailing list. It turns out that to enable power management on this device, the device must be open first. Something like

echo -n | aplay

in your rc.local script should do the trick.

hopefully this will give me few more minutes of battery time. Still no clue for the other device :

100.0%                      Device         Audio codec hwC0D3:

Intel

This page has plenty of good tips, most of them already integrated in the laptop-mode package in debian…

I added a couple of lines to my /etc/sysfs.conf file :

module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save=1
module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save_controller=Y

but the Audio codec hwC0D3: Intel is still there hanging with 100% :(