Did you ever get this? I have both the media base and the actual real dock for the armada 4100/4200. Dock is hard to find. Took two years on eBay almost every day waiting for one to show up. Media base with the cd rom is getting pretty common nowadays on eBay. Let me know and I can take either apart. Do have tons of the media base so if that works I can take it apart like the back of my hand. Have had to replace the rom and speakers it has.

I found in my photos where i did take pictures of the chips on the CD Media Base (Mobile CD Expansion Unit), has the ESS ES982 chip plus another ESS chip with ES689F. I'll try and open the actual dock (the one with network ports on it that go on the back and not the bottom, which is called the Convenient Base) and see if the ESS chip shows anything different for you when i can. May not be able to do this until Thursday.

I opened the Dock for my Compaq Armada 4100/4200 laptops. It does have an ESS chip on it at all. I assume the audio is passed through from the media expansion base, which is required to be plugged in to be able to plug the whole laptop up to the dock itself, your unable to dock using just hte laptop by itself cause its connection port is on the bottom, but the dock is from the back, only the media base has that connection on the back, so i assume its all pass through with the dock. I did take pictures of all the chips on the Dock, i'm posting them here anyways just in case someone is ever looking for this information for other reasons. Its more 13 pictures, so gotta post this 3 times due to the 5 attachment limit.

Next set of photos of the Compaq Dock chips.

Last set of photos of the Compaq Dock