Sound goes underwater - SOLVED

[alex666]

Hi all. I have an ASRock z68 extreme3 Gen3 i5 system (see sig). A couple of weeks ago, the front panel USB connectors suddenly died, and do not show up in windows device manager. This followed plugging in a cheap mp3 player that my son won at school. I'm able to live with that. But then suddenly today, out of the blue, my Realtek audio suddenly sounds like it's underwater: very garbled, almost an echo sound. Horrible sound. I have deleted the drivers and let Windows reinstall, rolled back the drivers, used Windows drivers, updated the drivers, no change. My speakers are fine, as I get the same sound through headphones. Windows tells me that my audio devices are working properly. My guess is that this might be the on-board audio controller. The audio had been working perfectly for two months. No problems. I've made no changes to hardware, no new drivers, nothing changed, no tweaks to the bios. I just started it up this morning and it was totally garbled for all sound.

I am open to any suggestions as to how to resolve this. But I am thinking that the mobo may be faulty, and I will need to RMA it back to ASRock.

Thanks.

[CMB]

Underwater is one of the sound effects available in the realtek environment settings. Any chance that the realtek sound is set to underwater ?

[alex666]

Well, well, well, I ran the newest Ubuntu off a CD and the sound was just fine. So now I'm stumped. Somehow this is a windows problem. I've nver run into this before. I am stumped. Perhaps a driver conflict? Though I'm not sure what driver this would be.

[alex666]

Underwater is one of the sound effects available in the realtek environment settings. Any chance that the realtek sound is set to underwater ?

No, I checked that, it's more than that, it's distorted pretty bad as well. Now that I've run Ubuntu without problem, I'm back to square one, though at least I know it's not the mobo. I was convinced it was the mobo and was ready to RMA.

I'll double check the environment sounds again just to make sure.

marty

[alex666]

SOLVED.

I noticed that my storage hdd was not being read in Windows, and then when I checked, not in the bios either. All connections were in place, but I disconnected the sata cable to the drive and the sound issues went away.

So is that weird or what? Now I need to figure out what the problem is there. But why would anything associated with my storage drive affect the sound so profoundly? Very weird.

marty