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Sound card hassles


Stealthbomber

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Ok, here's the deal...

 

I have a PC with an onboard realtek sound system.

It's got a bunch of 7.1 outputs to the back of the PC, which are all plugged into a 7.1 speaker set.

It's also got headphone and mic connections that go to jack-plugs on the front of the PC.

 

All works perfectly.

 

Back when games only had stereo sound everything was fine but now that games actually make use of 7.1 sound I am having problems and, TBH, I'm surprised more people aren't moaning about the same thing.

 

When I am playing games I get all sorts of wonderful noises. For example, I've just been playing a flight sim where I can hear missiles getting fired behind me, wing-men talk to me through one speaker and I get all sorts of clever effects.

 

Then I plug my headphones in and the problem appears.

 

Because the headphones are only stereo but the sound-card is still configured for 7.1 sound I lose a lot of the audio effects, usually including speech that tells me what my objectives are etc.

 

Now, I can go into Control Panel > Sound > Playback Devices and set my sound card to stereo mode, rather than 7.1 and then I WILL get all the sound through headphones but it seems an incredibly halfassed way of doing things.

 

I know it's not the end of the world but it's a helluva nuisance when, if the missus goes to bed for example, I have to quit out of a game, alter my sound card settings and then restart the game after plugging headphones in.

 

It's particulary annoying because one of the main reasons I chose to use the onboard realtek card was cos it can output to the headphone jack and automatically mutes the speakers when headphones are plugged in.

 

Anybody heard of this issue before and know if there's any kind of software gadget that can help with this?

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It's an Asus P5E-VDM mobo and I'm running Vista.

 

It's been a couple of months since I updated the drivers so I'll have a look at that.

 

TBH, I reckon the Realtek drivers have got worse and worse recently.

The original Realtek driver bundled with my mobo installed some fancy control-panel icon which controlled it all and also DID do stuff like automatically swap outputs around etc. It'd even juggle which rear outputs went to speakers and/or mic's for you.

 

Then they produced an updated driver which removed the Realtek Sound Centre icon and integrated all the controls into the Windows "Sounds" icon with a Realtek tab.

 

The latest version of the driver I have seems to have removed all traces of Realtek branding and now all the controls look like generic Windows Vista options AND a lot of the functionality is now missing. No way to swap around speaker configurations etc any more.

 

 

Thinking about it, the main reason I updated the driver was cos I was getting some corrupt sound in a couple of new games.

I can't recall what they were but, since I'm not playing any games at the moment I should probably roll back the driver to the previous one simply to restore some functionality.

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The latest version of the driver I have seems to have removed all traces of Realtek branding and now all the controls look like generic Windows Vista options AND a lot of the functionality is now missing. No way to swap around speaker configurations etc any more.

 

Is this what you're talking about?

 

captureuon.jpg

 

captudsre.jpg

 

If so, I do remember that going missing a year or two back, but it just needed me to reinstall the drivers.

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Funny how things work out...

 

I tried downloading the latest drivers for my sound card and mobo from the Asus and Realtek websites (same version from each) and, alas, it didn't make any difference.

 

Thing is, my mobo has a heap of outputs at the back and also a headphone and mic output at the front.

What used to happen was that as soon as I plugged headphones in at the front it'd swap from 7.1 to stereo and kill the rear-panel outputs so everything was lovely and automatic.

I'm guessing that the driver bundled with my mobo was specific to that mobo, or at least specific to mobo's with that feature, rather than being a generic Realtek driver.

 

Anyway, my PC threw a bit of a wobbly last night (something to do with arc-welding outside while the PC was copying big chunks of data I suspect) and, as a result, I've formatted my HDD and decided to give W7 a go instead.

 

Wouldn't you know it, the W7 Realtek driver has a bunch of tick-boxes for stuff like auto-muting speakers when headphones are plugged in and auto-configuring the outputs to suit the speakers or headphones in use.

They must have spotted the issue I was having cos there's a specific tick-box for "Revert to stereo output through headphones".

 

Anyway, all smiles now. :D

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