Garbled sound with Realtek Audio

[nlrfinley]

Hello all.... I have an HP M9520F PC running Vista SP2 with RealTek audio. My Win systems sounds work fine but when I try to play videos online all I get from my browser is scratchy, muddy, unusable audio with barely any volume. Updated the drivers - no diff then tried using I.E. instead of my usual Firefox (both reasonably current). Music plays back just fine using I.E. but, like Firefox, you can't understand the spoken word... Need to do some training videos so I need to fix ASAP - any thoughts on what I need to do??

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Try updating the Flash Player to the latest version. Although IE also uses Flash Player (and you say the problem doesn't exist in IE), the player in IE uses ActiveX components, whereas the same player in Firefox runs as a regular plugin. It could be just the plugin component that's causing the problem so it's worth trying to update it.

 

[nlrfinley]

Try updating the Flash Player to the latest version. Although IE also uses Flash Player (and you say the problem doesn't exist in IE), the player in IE uses ActiveX components, whereas the same player in Firefox runs as a regular plugin. It could be just the plugin component that's causing the problem so it's worth trying to update it.

Phil,

Thanks for your feedback.... Tried updating / using the Flash Player components (LOTS of warnings about security issues) and it didn't help - ended up disabling it because of the perceived risk. Still had the same scratchy, muddled voices I had with I.E. before that (it never was any better than Firefox in that regard per original post). Any other ideas? Anyone??

 

[nlrfinley]

Have had time to fiddle with this problem again lately and have noticed something I'd surprisingly never realized: pausing any video I'm playing until it's had to time to buffer a significant amount of sound makes a real difference. Does anyone think that network speed / latency might have anything to do with this? BTW, I have Verizon wireless internet and, even tho I live in the boonies, I usually get 1.5 - 2.5 megabits per second which seems to be pretty snappy for everything else....

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

You could try Google Chrome which has Flash Player built-in and it updates automatically in the background:
https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/

Bear in mind that with a borderline broadband speed less than 3 megabits you will get constant buffering pauses whichever web browser you use, especially if the video is high res.