Audio mysteriously not working after numerous attempts to fix the problem

[hinkdog1]

My audio doesn't work. It worked fine when I built the system about 4 years ago, but it hasn't been working for about a year now (major bummer). I have an Asrock Z77 Extreme4. I did all my trouble shooting quite a while ago so it's not fresh in my mind. Speakers don't work plugged into the rear jacks and headphones don't work plugged into the front jack either. Everything I look at, whether it's the Windows troubleshooting tool or the Control Panel or HWiNFO, shows devices working properly with green checkmarks. I made sure I had the latest drivers (although it didn't make sense to me that it was a driver problem since it worked fine for years until it just stopped working). Then I decided that maybe it was a motherboard failure so I bought and installed a Xonar sound card and it still doesn't work! The front audio jacks are plugged into the sound card now but headphones still don't work plugged into the front jack, and speakers don't work plugged into the rear sound card jacks. What's going on? Could the sound card not be installed properly or it's not my default? Help please.

 

[The Paladin]

1. the Asrock Z77 Extreme4 motherboard has its own 7.1 CH HD Audio with Content Protection (Realtek ALC898 Audio Codec) sound chipset.
if windows report all is functional that is what it is talking about.

2. you install a PCIE card "Xonar sound card" and your still unable to get sound from speakers and headphones.

do you have an nvidia video card perhaps ? have you gone to right click on your speaker icon (the windows one) and selected "SOUNDS"?
in there under playback you can see if your "speakers" are set as default output, ore is the nvidia sound to your "monitor" select ?

 

[hinkdog1]

1. the Asrock Z77 Extreme4 motherboard has its own 7.1 CH HD Audio with Content Protection (Realtek ALC898 Audio Codec) sound chipset.
if windows report all is functional that is what it is talking about.

2. you install a PCIE card "Xonar sound card" and your still unable to get sound from speakers and headphones.

do you have an nvidia video card perhaps ? have you gone to right click on your speaker icon (the windows one) and selected "SOUNDS"?
in there under playback you can see if your "speakers" are set as default output, ore is the nvidia sound to your "monitor" select ?

I have a Radeon HD 7670 video card. It looks like my default output is speakers through Asus Xonar DSX.

 

[hinkdog1]

Was I right to suspect that maybe the audio on the mobo failed? If it did fail, would Windows still be reporting that the Realtek audio was functioning properly?

I went into the BIOS and disabled the onboard audio. I don't know if this was necessary, but it didn't help the problem.