Hi everyone.

Not sure if this is the right place, but I lost patience to look for another forum so...

In short, I've had it up to here with Realtek. Yesterday I connected my computer to our TV via DHMI to play a DVD (our PLaystation is broken). We had to disable the internal speakers before the computer understood it was supposed to give both sound and image to our TV. After disconnecting HDMI I enabled the speakers again but the sound was all distorted: too sharp, unnatural emphaisis on low frequencies etc. All the settings were fine so I ended up re-installing the driver again. Now it's even worse. Music plays fine again, but the rest of the sounds (Skype, mail, Internet, speech) are all abnormally loud, and they even come with an echo: first the normal volume sound, then the loud echo.

What on earth do I do now? It's as if two devices are simultaneously producing system sounds and I just don't know how that's possible. Windows says everything is working correctly, but then again they say Windows 8.1 is good too...

sound panel showing more devices than for one?

Nope, just my Realtek speakers which is the default device.

UPDATE: Problem definitely lies with the Realtek Driver. It even started going crazy after Jaws was removed.

UPDATE: Problem definitely lies with the Realtek Driver. It even started going crazy after Jaws was removed.

There's nothing definite there, sadly... Jaws (I assume you're talking about the screen reader software) may be uninstalled but it doesn't clean up properly if it's removed... and the nature of what it does makes me instantly suspicious that it might be responsible for what's going on...

Have you tried a System Restore back to before this started happening?

I haven't, no, because system restores are rather risky with screenreaders and I've had to re-install the thing so many times now that I'm running out of activation keys...

What happened was this: I deleted Jaws this morning and re-installed Realtek. Everything went fine. Then it occured to me it might be a good idea to uncheck the 'allow applications to take control of this device' box. As soon as I had done that, everything was back to abnormal. Also, I asked Jaws to delete all my user settings and deleted every related application.

Okay, I've been a stupid idiot. I've been installing the wrong driver. So anyway, now I have the good one from Assus's own website. Next problem: Realtek is normalising every sound. Now what?

FINAL UPDATE: The cause for all the aformentioned problems is the stupid AudioWizard that comes with Realtek HD Audio Manager. NEVER USE IT. It distorts all your sound and apparently also corrupts screenreaders. Just turn it off.