No sound!?!?! HELP

[msmrx57]

Hopefully someone here has an idea what the heck is going on with my sound. The rig I built with the parts TGS sent me has been working beautifully, the last week no sound. I've been just using the on-board Realtek. The OS is Window 7 Home 64bit. Device manager shows everything installed, drivers current but it wouldn't make a peep. Re-installed the drivers and with a couple of re-starts it was fine. Now last night same thing. So instead of just going through a bunch of monkeying around to get it to work for a little while I stuck a Creative X-FI extremme gamer in installed all the drivers and nothing. Re-installed everything still nothing. Going through control panel to sounds and going to speaker properties if I hit the test button I get an error message "failed to play test tone." Any suggestions on where to even start trying to fix this?

[Konrad]

Obviously some sort of driver/configuration issue. Back in the old days I would say this sort of thing might be caused by an IRQ conflict or device driver failing to initialize at startup. You might be able to fix the problem by forcing the audio to startup through some obscure setting or by editing MSCONFIG files.

Assuming you have the latest drivers for your mobo and chipset and the audio chip itself, and that your Windows install hasn't become infirm, I would (re)install DirectX then Windows Media Player (to reassert the OS-embedded codecs). If that still fails there's still a chance of a "miraculous" fix to the problem occurring after you install a 3rd-party media player like Winamp.

You might have a bad config or hardware failure instead - your system expecting to autodetect a 7.1 sound system when only headphones are present or somesuch. The problem might even be caused by bad audio wires.

[Airbozo]

Did you install a new video card lately?

That caused a similar problem for me in the past. It disabled the audio on my motherboard and activated the audio on the card due to the HDMI port. It didn't happen when I installed the card either. It happened months later when I plugged in the TV to that card.

[Konrad]

Earlier HDMI implementations were sometimes a bit problematic - basically HDMI=DVI+audio, but not all of the audio/video hardware makers could always keep up with DirectX (which was also struggling to keep up) and awesome/broken Windows Vista sure as hell didn't help things out. I think revised HDMI standards (and the death of Vista) fixed that all up, I could be wrong.

The market is currently flooded with bad DisplayPort cables (and adapters). They're uncertified and underspec and people stuck with them have reported a bewildering array of little audio/video (and system instability) issues caused by data leaking out of the bad interface. It seems a bit odd to me, but I've seen enough computing oddities in my time to not disbelieve it.

You can always rollback to an earlier/older driver version or codec library, one known to work.

Other troubleshooting options include the use of crowbar, axe, chainsaw, sledgehammer, and shovel.

[msmrx57]

Well as the drivers are all updated. It does it with both the on board and separate sound card I'm leaning towards Windows is borked.

[Konrad]

A nuke-and-pave clean OS install hopefully fixes your issue.

Realtek codec issues/failures (on Asus mobos, mostly) appear to be both notorious and persistent. Numerous causes/fixes are suggested online, few comments about which (if any) of these may have worked. I suspect bad driver or firmware code, if not outright chip failure, but I've learned to never rule out Windows as the cause of all evil, guilty until proven innocent! I almost do not want to buy any more Asus motherboards, and I am not fooled by the supposedly-high-end Asus/ROG SupremeFX 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC being, in fact, a ROG-packaged and renamed pretty-good-but-far-from-spectacular Realtek ALC1150 part.

But this could be a good excuse to install a dedicated audio card! Choices basically boil down to Creative or Asus, and - curiously - the Asus product marketing makes a big deal about not using Realtek parts.