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