Stuck in karaoke mode!? Help!

[VulcaN]

I just installed the Asus P5Q-PRO mobo using the onboard Realtek audio.
I am running 64-Bit Vista.
I have installed the latest drivers from asus / realtek.

Problem:
I went to play a MP3 and noticed it sounded horrible! After listening to it for a while it sounds like karaoke mode. The main singers voice is almost non existent and other sounds are much louder such as backup singer voices and the instrumentals.
This happens in every program: media player, winamp, games, even windows default sounds.

At first I thought I was stuck in karaoke mode, but this was not the case! The center channel sounds (and subwoofer, I believe these are tied together?) are very very faint, almost so you cant hear them at all!

If I move the BALANCE slider all the way to left or right then I can hear most sounds, a bit distorted, but the vocals and bass fill right in... The weird part is, if the balance is all the way to the left, the right side still plays! The left speaker just sounds slightly louder than the right and vice-versa.

When I set the balance to the center- like it should be, all voices, bass and other center channel sounds fade away. I just hear things like music / chatter and background sounds such as a far off explosion in a movie.

I have no idea how to fix this at this point. I am about to just buy creative X-FI & hope that it works in vista 64 well enough by now (I know how shitty their support for vista was at some point)

 

[VulcaN]

Any ideas? Im dying here trying to play games and watch movies without being able to hear over half the sound im supposed to!

 

[VulcaN]

Ok so I got a X-Fi today and threw it in there and I have the SAME problem. I disabled the onboard audio, uninstalled the drivers and ran driver cleaner just incase.

Now I know its not the headphones because ive tried two pairs and they work fine in other devices. So some setting in vista I guess is screwing everything up.

Im really at a loss now, I dont have time to reinstall vista and backup all my user data at the moment. I doubt that would even fix it because this just started happening with a fresh install of vista 64.

I thought some people might be having trouble understanding what im trying to describe so I made some simple pictures.

This is how the balance normally is, and when setup like this the center channel sounds and bass are all very very faint, so faint you almost cant hear them unless you are purposefully trying to listen for them:

In these next two modes, I can hear all the sounds I am supposed to but they sound slightly distorted. It sounds like someone who knew nothing about sound got a hold of an equalizer and just through the dials every which way.

Also, in these modes you would expect the L or R channel that is set to 0 volume to be just that, 0 volume in the headphones. But in both these modes, sound plays out of both the R and L drivers in the headphones. Im pretty sure its mono sound as well but I could be wrong. The sound is also slightly louder towards whichever side is set to 100 percent volume.

If I do the speaker test in windows control panel sound settings, where it should play sound out of the L and R speakers to help you tell which one is which, it plays the test out of BOTH when doing the left and right tests.

ALSO note that although C is set to 0 setting it to 100 has no effect whatsoever.

ps sorry about the whitespace dont have photoshop installed yet

 

[Manntis]

I had the same problem - here's how I corrected it:

I went into control panel / system / hardware / device manager and deleted Realtek High Definition Audio from the Sounds menu

I then opened CCleaner and used its Tools function to uninstall Realtek High Definition Audio

I downloaded a new copy of the driver - but not from Realtek, as all thier servers were saying "file not found" - go figure.

I rebooted and installed using the driver .exe that I'd downloaded. Problem solved