Hi, I'm having a strange problem with the sound on my PC and I'd greatly appreciate any of your advice. I realize the text might be a little too long for someone (I tried to be as thorough as possible) so I've written a short version of the problem as well.
Short version:
Ever since waking my computer up from hibernation yesterday, all my sounds are muted to about 5%. I'm using W7 64bit Home SP1 and my soundcard is Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.1. It happens with both the speakers and the headphones (connected to either front or back, doesn't matter) so it definetely isn't either of them. I googled the problem and found several possible solutions, including a reinstall of the soundcard drivers and a PC restart with the unplugged speakers/headphones, none of which worked. The sound randomly came back three times for 1-2 hours but then just as randomly muted again. Two days ago I plugged a USB stick to the PC after which the sound muted to about 50-70%, after unplugging it it came back to 100%. So obviously I've plugged and unplugged the stick several times since then in hope that's the cause but without any result.
Long version:
Two days ago I've put my computer into hibernation just like any day, without any problems with the sound whatsoever. When I turned it on again yesterday I've found out that I'm not getting any sound from any source (meaning music, videos, games etc.).
I'm using W7 64bit Home SP1 and my soundcard is Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.1. It happens with both the speakers and the headphones (connected to either front or back, doesn't matter) so it definetely isn't either of them.
Only when I boost the Windows sound up to about 100% and do the same with the speakers hardware controller I can hear the sound but it's still pretty low, and is of a very bad quality as it always is whenever I boost the Windows sound that high (I believe that is a usual thing to happen - makes sense that it's better to turn the volume up via hardware rather than software).
Two days ago I plugged a USB stick to the computer's front panel to do a Windows Backup (first time using USB stick) and it muted all sounds to about 50-70%. When I unplugged it it went back to 100% again. So although right now it's muted to much more, say 5%, I obviously tried plugging and unplugging the USB stick several times but it did nothing.
Also while going through the Windows Sound settings I've noticed the mute-while-placing-or-receiving-phone-calls options in the Communications tab. It was at 50 or 80%, so I changed it to 'Do nothing' in hope that it somehow mistaken the USB stick for a microphone or something and that it thought that it's still plugged in. Didn't help.
The strangest thing is that it suddenly started working again about 20 hours ago for about an hour but then, out of the blue, without any interaction from me, while watching a video, it went back to the mute state. This happened again (also while watching a video) about 12 hours ago, again for about an hour.
I've of course googled the problem and came up with several possible solutions from which I've all tried and came up unsuccessful:
- using AVG TuneUp to clean up the system
- scanning the system with an antivirus since I read somewhere it could be a virus
- reinstalling the soundcard's drivers
- unplugging the speakers/headphones and restarting the computer (either this or the drivers reinstall might've actually helped for a while, more about that in the following paragraph)
After the mentioned restart of the PC I thought it fixed it (that or the reinstall of the drivers which happened at the same time) and it was ok for about two hours but then again it muted. However this time it might have not been so randomly as I was playing a game (sounds like I do nothing else than watching videos and playing games lol but actually it was just my day off) and it muted right at the time when there were a lot more sounds (lots of voices and other sounds at the same time) than before.
I'm not sure if this is relevant but often (once or twice a day) before this problem occured, my sound would become really noisy (interestingly pretty much only during videos, very rarely while playing music or games) but I've found an easy fix for that by selecting a different default format under Sound/Speakers/Advanced. After that the sound would immediately become clean again so I didn't investigate the reason why it would do this.
Thank you for reading this and thank you for your help.