Faint Audio

[Unregistered]

I can't for the life of me figure out why this has happened but the audio on my computer suddenly has gone very quiet. I have a nice set of surround sound speakers and even at full blast my grandma could handle it. I reinstalled my audio driver (SoundMAX) and have checked every volume control i can think of. i don't think its a virus and i didn't blow the fuse either. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[jharriso]

Have you narrowed it down to a specific component?
For instance, does everything sound OK if you plug headphones into the audio out jack? Does your speaker setup work on a different system, or a MP3 player or something?
On my girlfriend's speaker setup, there are three different volume controls, one on the front of the subwoofer, one on the back, and one that connects via a cable. If your system is like that, you've checked all of those as well?

[fischerm]

Check with headphones and different sources as Josh suggested first. If you have a friend with a spare sound card, swapping cards would be my next troubleshooting step. We had this happen to one of our PCs in the MLL, the sound card had blown its power amp and couldn't push out any substantial volume. We just had to replace the card.

[Unregistered]

i have narrowed it down to some sort of problem with my speakers. i have a different set that i plugged in and they sound fine. get this though, when the right front speaker (with power on and volume control) is plugged all the way into the sub the problem occurs. but if i pull it out just a bit my speakers power up fully. the light indicator for power is no longer on and i can't control the volume via this speaker either. pretty strange (to me at least).

[dparm]

Do you have it set for "Digital Output Only"? That shouldn't be checked unless you've got digital speakers (pretty rare).

[Unregistered]

Do you have it set for "Digital Output Only"? That shouldn't be checked unless you've got digital speakers (pretty rare).

how do you check that?

[dparm]

Double-click the volume icon near your clock and check the Advanced Properties for "Volume Control". There may or may not be an option listed for "Digital Output Only" (some sound cards do not support this, but almost any Creative one does).