[SOLVED] Headphones suddenly quit working

[eazlyamused]

My headphones were working fine plugged into the front jack of my desktop and all of a sudden they don't work. In Windows control panel it shows them as enabled but not plugged in (they are plugged in...) At first, I thought something must be wrong with the jack, but they don't work in the rear jack either. I tried it with another pair of speakers and they don't work either so I think I may be missing a setting. Both work fine plugged into my laptop, so nothing is wrong with the cables or the connectors.. (My regular speakers are working fine...)

 

[Paperdoc]

You say you have speakers that have been working, but when you test the front and rear panel jacks with them you get no sound, similar to the headphones. I suspect you may have started using a video card, and now normally have the speakers attached to the monitor in some way.

IF you installed a video card and switched to using that instead of on-board video, there is a very likely explanation and easy solution. Even if that's not the case, the solution may be simple (see later). If you installed a new video card, almost all such cards now include an HDMI output port to connect to your monitor, and HDMI can carry sound to the monitor, unlike other connections. To make that work, the video card has to have access to audio signals. It is pretty hard to route audio information from a mobo audio chip to a video card in a PCIe slot. So instead, the video card has its own audio system on it. At the time you install that card, the Install routines usually install the device drivers for BOTH the video and audio systems on the card, and then make a change to a Windows configuration to enable sound output from that card via the HDMI cable to your monitor.

What this means is that your system now has TWO separate pieces of hardware for playing back sound - one built into your mobo that sends its signals out by the front panel and rear panel jacks, and another that sends its sound signals out on the HDMI cable (and MAYBE on a sound jack on the VIDEO card back panel if it has one). But Windows can only use ONE system at a time to send out sound. When the Video card Install was done, the control of which output hardware it uses was switched to using the HDMI output only; thus the front and rear panel jacks fed from the mobo audio chip now do nothing.

YOU can change this. Go into where you set Windows system settings and look for the Sound settings. Look for which device is set to be the Default Sound Playback device. My guess is that it is set now to use the system on your video card. Change that to the system on your mobo (probably by Realtek), and all sound playback will start coming out of the front and rear panel jacks of your mobo. But this also means that your monitor will NOT get sound via the HDMI cable, so you will need to be sure to plug your speakers into the jack in the mobo rear panel.

Even if you did NOT make a change to your video system that caused all this, DO look carefully at how Windows is sending out sound, and ensure that it is set to use your mobo's built-in audio system so that your front and rear panel jacks will work.

A last note. If none of this works and you have ONLY the mobo Realtek system to use, let us know. There is a different wrinkle in using Realtek systems that can cause it to fail to give sound as expected.

 

[eazlyamused]

Hi, Thanks for your answer. The front and rear jacks work with the main speakers, it's just the headphones and the extra speakers that quit working using the same jacks. In control panel it says they are enabled but disconnected.

 

[Paperdoc]

OK, need clarifications then.

1. Your headphones do not work in the front panel jack. And that means particularly the GREEN colour coded front panel jack. Right? But you have one set of speakers that DO work when plugged in there? This is a check on the front jack. More specifically, if you have one set of speakers plugged in to the rear jack and ALSO another set of speakers that you know works plugged into the FRONT jack, do BOTH speakers work?
2. If you plug the headphones into the rear jack that you say still works with one set of speakers, do the headphones work from that jack? This is a check on the headphones. These two queries are aimed at a particular setting for automatic cancellation of the front jack in some configurations.

What I am aiming for here is this: can you get ALL of your speakers and the headphones to work one at a time if only ONE of them is plugged into that one rear jack that works for at least one set of speakers. This is a test of each of the sets of speakers and headphones. If they all can work in some circumstances, then we need to look for particular reasons why they don't work in other situations.