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Old November 14th 20, 01:58 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Yes[_2_]
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Default problem with audio - question

Paul wrote:

Yes wrote:
Steve Hough wrote:

Paul was thinking very hard :
Yes wrote:
I have an Asus B150-M-A mobo with an integrated graphics
chip and Realtek ALC887 codec. I connect it via HDMI cable
to my living room TV when I want to use the pc. It's worked
very well for my needs (web surfing and anime videos).
Today, the audio stopped working. The videos works.

At first I was thinking buy a cheap sound card because the
current problem is no sound, but I ran across a comment while
googling that indicated the problem will actually involve the
on-board graphics chip because that's the chip that combines
the audio and video signals to the TV via HDMI. Is this
correct?

When everything is doee, I just want to get back to the way
things were before - use the pc to surf and watch stuff and
display it using the TV as my monitor like I've been doing.
Obviously, buying a new mobo might solve my problem, but would
buying a video card or a sound card fix my problem?

Thanks,

John
It's a good thing you caught that.

Analog sound comes from a different place than digital sound.

Examples of analog sound sources (lime green colored 1/8" jack)

1) I/O plate lime green - HDAudio chip on motherboard
- actual damage (unlikely) ? replace
motherboard

2) Faceplate, audio soundcard - Audio chip on soundcard
- actual damage (unlikely) ? replace
plugin soundcard

3) USB audio dongle (two jack) - Audio chip inside dongle
- actual damage (unlikely) ? replace
dongle

First generation digital sound, ran at 6mbit/sec over
a coaxial cable. It was called S'PDIF. It carried stereo
in perhaps 24bit, or could carry AC3 5.1 compressed (picked
right off a movie DVD). The copper version of S'PDIF used
the coax cable, 1 volt amplitude, transformer isolated (to
avoid ground differences when cabling up). The optical
version was called TOSLink, used a red LED lightsource,
and cheap dental plastic fiber cable.

S'PDIF could come from (1) and use a stubby I/O plate addon
or be a jack on the PC. I don't know if having it on (2) or
(3) was common. On motherboards, a square connector with
a rubber cover can be a TOSLink digital coming from (1).

Then came HDMI audio. At first, HDMI was little better than
a different connector on DVI. If you had an old enough
computer, it wasn't really HDMI, and it also didn't have
audio as a result. DVI doesn't have audio. HDMI made by
bodging a DVI signal, doesn't have audio capability either.

Then we had HDMI, and it still didn't have audio. But at
least the cable clock went from 165MHz max DVI clock
to 330MHz HDMI clock. It was "real" HDMI only in the
sense that it had broken its bonds and limits with DVI.

The first digital audio on HDMI was probably on video
cards. They put an S'PDIF connector (!) on the top edge
of NVidia cards for example. The cable might have been
a couple pins. And a wire went to the S'PDIF three pin or
so, mobo header connector. That was a kind of "passthru audio",
digital in form. The 6mbit/sec S'PDIF was then converted
into 7.1 LPCM (= no compression) on HDMI. The Windows
sound would make a mention of "digital" and sometimes
"AMD, NVidia, Intel" or similar branding. Intel having
killed off a lot of other potential mobo video sources.

The last several standards versions of HDMI, they're
being delivered right from the video card, without
"passthru". No info is available on the CODEC logic
block in the GPU on the video card. One version used
a RealTek driver, implying Realtek sold some IP
(intellectual property) for an HDAudio sound chip
for inclusion in the GPU. As I don't think a 48-pin
HDAudio chip has been spotted on the video card.

*******

Now, your audio has flown the coop, because of a software
issue. It means some service has taken a ****. Or,
perhaps you removed a service responsible for
"Audio Endpoint" as instructed by the blackviper.com
website. I've had to scrounge through Google before,
to find mention of what service that is, but I didn't
keep notes. If you've "blackvipered" this setup,
then now is a good time to mention it :-) I won't
give you a lot of hell for this, as it's easy to be
tricked into doing that stuff based on Internet info.
Blackviper site, tells you how to disable a lot of
services (I suppose, a topic popular with rabid
gamers with 32GB machines, out to save 3 bytes by
turning off a service).

Now, all that guff I typed out in the first section
above, will come in handy. This article shows how
to select and set a "Default" audio source in Windows 10.



https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html
ASUS VE278 (NVidia High Definition Audio)

Well, I'm not sure exactly that what one is :-)
I looked it up, and that's the name of an LCD monitor
with speakers in it. So that HDMI port gained the name
of the monitor when the monitor got plugged in. Neat.

You can reset the audio setting to make your named
monitor (the TV set), the output for sound if you
want.

That would be the first step, before the panic sets in.
No need (yet) to be buying hardware :-) If the
video card outputs, HDMI connectors, are not mentioned
at all, then I'd check Device Manager (devmgmt.msc) and
see see if any yellow marks are present, indicating
a driver got updated by Microsoft and is no longer
loading properly.

1) Check settings. Even setting a volume to zero
somewhere can kill sound. Check that a mute button
hasn't been pressed (mute = 0 volume), or that the
volume dial or slider is set to zero.

Make sure the Default audio output is set to the TV.

Check Device Manager for yellow marks. Note any
code (Code 10, Code 22 etc). You can even go into
Device Manager and select Disable for a piece of
hardware, and it won't look "damaged" at all. That's
why you have to check stuff in there.

2) Think about any BlackVipering you've been doing.
The turning off of (unrelated!) services can kill audio.
I didn't believe that was possible, until someone
managed to do it. The audio service did not list the
Dependency in the Dependency tab. And that is when I
first learned that the Dependency tab is not computed by
software, but is statically entered by (mistake making)
humans at MSFT.

3) You would need to spend considerable time working
on (1) and (2), before concluding it was hardware.
And in particular, it's highly highly unlikely that
a logic block in the GPU blew up. If the computer
image on the TV screen was a mess, it would be easy
to see how decoding audio from that stream could be
difficult. Since you make no mention of substandard
or destroyed video quality, then that's part of the
highly highly unlikely part. The sound just can't fail.
Maybe if the speaker amp blew out on the TV set :-) ...

Paul
Or, he could try reinstalling the audio drivers and/or audio
codecs.


Tried that after posting, but ran into a dead end. Googling, the
recommendations were to go to device manager and find the device. I
couldn't find any device underneath sound or the other category
involving sound/video.

Next, ran the Hardware Wizard (reached via Windows 10 options
underneath Device Manager). The wizard failed to find any 'new'
hardware. Last thing I did last night was to go to RealTek's web
site, d/l the most current driver they had for my O/S installed it
and rebooted. That s/w reported a successful install, but even
after rebooting I still had the same problem - I could watch
something but not hear anything.

My testing involved playing a YouTube video on my pc to see what
happened. Video worked but no sound. I used my TV (Roku TV) - it
doubles as the monitor and audio for my pc - to find that same video
and play it. Using the Roku TV, the YouTube video played and I
could listen to audio of the video. The TV showed no problems
playing the A/V of the YouTube video. So I concluded that the
problem lies with my pc and not affected by the Roku TV.

I suppose the last ditch effort I could make would be to install
some version of linux to see if it could fix my problem. If so, I
guess I could then just re-install Windows 10 if the audio resumed
working under linux. Not particularly enamored doing that :-(

John


If the audio is traveling over the HDMI cable,
a GPU is driving that, and you need the audio
driver inside the GPU driver package to restore
sound over HDMI.

Here is the picture again.

https://i.postimg.cc/brDwSqjx/audio-driver.gif

See the "nvhda.inf" ?

Search for that on your PC, right click it, select "Install"
from the top of the right-click menu.

I don't know what drives your HDMI cable as a GPU.

That example picture is for my plugin NVidia video card.

It could even be Intel video for that matter (a GPU
inside the CPU package), and then you need an
Intel driver for the HDMI cable and the audio on it.

******* Intel digital audio example *******


https://www.catalog.update.microsoft...086%26DEV_2805

Intel Corporation - MEDIA - 4/26/2018 12:00:00 AM - 6.16.0.3208
Windows 10, version 1809 and later, Servicing Drivers
Drivers (Sound) 4/25/2018 6.16.0.3208 230 KB

And the file has "intcdaud" in the name, which should likely be parsed
as stock ticker INTC Digital Audio. It's a CAB file. I like to open
these downloads with 7ZIP from www.7-zip.org and do "Extract" into
the nearest convenient empty folder.

******* Intel digital audio example *******

Since I don't know exactly what I'm dealing with,
these will remain for the moment, "examples".

And don't switch to Linux to test this. Of course
it's going to work. Then you have to climb back on
your horse and install Windows 10 again. This is
just "broken software", and sooner or later,
you're going to fix it, right ? Think positive.

I've been defeated by drivers before. I had to
reinstall Win2K once, because I didn't practice "good hygiene"
with my video drivers. I had Matrox, NVidia, and ATI
drivers in the machine at the same time. And AGP Texture
acceleration stopped working, my games were broke. And I
tried every "cleaner" on the face of the earth, and
could not get it fixed. That required a reinstall, to
make sure no remnants of any evil spirits were
left in the machine :-) So, yeah, sometimes you
get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you.
Right now, you're dealing with a rabbit, not a
bear.

Paul


Sorry for the delay. Despite your advice, I made a bootable Linux Mint
USB to test if my audio problem was due to a problem on the hardware.
After booting my pc into linux, I played some videos from YouTube and
another source. Both audio and video worked without a hitch, so I
conclude that my problem is solely related to software and not to
hardware.

John