Question Muffled/Low Quality Audio on new/upgraded build ?

Feb 27, 2023
1
0
10
Hiii! This is my first time asking for help on a public forum so please excuse me if this isn’t the right board to ask this question!

I recently upgraded my PC for the first time in nearly six years and the entire process went over smoothly and with little issues. In regards to performance everything is running flawlessly, temperatures are in check, every game I have tested has run perfectly even after prolonged sessions, everything seemed to fall into place except one little detail… The audio quality has deteriorated to nearly unplayable levels.

I am not an expert with anything relating to audio, I’m no audiophile after all, but the sudden drop in quality is palpable. If I were to describe the sudden shift it would be that the entire experience feels very amalgamated. There is little audio depth in games, footsteps are barely audible, guns and sfx sound “damp” and lack any sort of punch or sharpness, everything seems to be crammed into one jumbled, auditory mess. It’s not “unplayable” by any means but it certainly detracts from the experience and it saps all excitement I’ve had for this build. Again, the performance is immaculate so I do not believe that any of the hardware is faulty.

I’ll list my previous and current specs respectively so you can all gauge if there are any outliers that might be of concern. My previous build was just a prebuilt Dell desktop that I refitted into a NZXT Noctis 450 ATX case and an upgraded Power Supply so I do not have any specifics relating to the previous Motherboard or RAM but I doubt those have anything to do with the issue.

Specs:
-Generic LGA 1151 Socket Dell Motherboard > MSI PRO Z690-A
-Intel Core i7-6700 > Intel Core i5-13600k (Not Overclocked yet)
-Zotac GTX 1060 6GB > MSI RTX 3060 12GB
-Generic DDR4 2133MHz 16GB (2 x 8 GB) > CORSAIR Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200Mhz 32GB (4 x 8 GB)
-MSI MAG Coreliquid 240R V2 AiO Cooler
-Windows 10 running on 256 GB SSD (This one is old so I don’t really remember the brand) + Additional 2 TB Western Digital HDD (Currently unplugged)
-CORSAIR CX750M Power Supply

Funnily enough this wasn’t the first time I’ve confronted this same audio issue but I cannot recall how I fixed it the first time but the fact it happened once already gives me a glimmer of hope that maybe some of you much more deft in this whole PC thing might have a fix that can help. The first time I encountered this was when I soft-reseted my Windows 10 when I upgraded from the GTX 1060 to the RTX 3060 (this upgrade happened nearly a year back but I didn’t have the budget to upgrade my entire PC at the time so every other change mentioned previously happened recently excluding the GPU obviously.) For this reason I decided to remove my HDD and wipe my SSD for a clean Windows 10 install hoping it would fix the issue.

Currently I’ve tried various things on the old Windows save and on the new, clean one. These include:
-Updating all possible drivers (Realtek, MSI, Intel, Windows etc.) and reverting them to see if any mix of past and updated drivers fixed the issue (currently running the most updated iterations of all drivers.)
-Trying different audio codecs. I tried the integrated Windows audio, Realtek(R) and Realtek High Definition Audio.
-I’ve tried using multiple different headsets and headphones on both the front and back I/Os all having the same muffled effect (I also tried Bluetooth headphones but they were Apple Airpods so I couldn’t feasibly tell if there was any change in quality.
-I disabled and enabled all sorts of combinations of Enhancements on Windows and the integrated Realtek Audio Manager that comes with the MSI Bios.
-I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled everything, the Windows 10 OS, the MSI Bios, all of the software pertaining to audio and their respective drivers.
-Finally I’ve tinkered with both Steelseries Sonar’s equalizer and Dolby Atmos but neither of them truly fixed the underlying issue (muffled and incohesive audio) but they certainly helped stabilize the audio sources so I’ve used them as a temporary remedy.

I am still flabbergasted at the fact that audio has been the most convoluted part of the PC building process, even more so considering that I had faced similar issues before but cannot for the life of me remember how I fixed it! If any of you has any sort of suggestions or possible fixes please let me know, I’m willing to try anything out at this point. I wholeheartedly suspect it has to do something with either the Motherboard or the wretched Realtek drivers but I don’t have any substantial evidence to base these claims off of. I’m still a novice with all of these tech things so any advice will be very appreciated.

I’ll try to respond to any questions as fast as I can in the case I might’ve missed any important details. Thanks in advance :D
 
Hiii! This is my first time asking for help on a public forum so please excuse me if this isn’t the right board to ask this question!

I recently upgraded my PC for the first time in nearly six years and the entire process went over smoothly and with little issues. In regards to performance everything is running flawlessly, temperatures are in check, every game I have tested has run perfectly even after prolonged sessions, everything seemed to fall into place except one little detail… The audio quality has deteriorated to nearly unplayable levels.

I am not an expert with anything relating to audio, I’m no audiophile after all, but the sudden drop in quality is palpable. If I were to describe the sudden shift it would be that the entire experience feels very amalgamated. There is little audio depth in games, footsteps are barely audible, guns and sfx sound “damp” and lack any sort of punch or sharpness, everything seems to be crammed into one jumbled, auditory mess. It’s not “unplayable” by any means but it certainly detracts from the experience and it saps all excitement I’ve had for this build. Again, the performance is immaculate so I do not believe that any of the hardware is faulty.

I’ll list my previous and current specs respectively so you can all gauge if there are any outliers that might be of concern. My previous build was just a prebuilt Dell desktop that I refitted into a NZXT Noctis 450 ATX case and an upgraded Power Supply so I do not have any specifics relating to the previous Motherboard or RAM but I doubt those have anything to do with the issue.

Specs:
-Generic LGA 1151 Socket Dell Motherboard > MSI PRO Z690-A
-Intel Core i7-6700 > Intel Core i5-13600k (Not Overclocked yet)
-Zotac GTX 1060 6GB > MSI RTX 3060 12GB
-Generic DDR4 2133MHz 16GB (2 x 8 GB) > CORSAIR Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200Mhz 32GB (4 x 8 GB)
-MSI MAG Coreliquid 240R V2 AiO Cooler
-Windows 10 running on 256 GB SSD (This one is old so I don’t really remember the brand) + Additional 2 TB Western Digital HDD (Currently unplugged)
-CORSAIR CX750M Power Supply

Funnily enough this wasn’t the first time I’ve confronted this same audio issue but I cannot recall how I fixed it the first time but the fact it happened once already gives me a glimmer of hope that maybe some of you much more deft in this whole PC thing might have a fix that can help. The first time I encountered this was when I soft-reseted my Windows 10 when I upgraded from the GTX 1060 to the RTX 3060 (this upgrade happened nearly a year back but I didn’t have the budget to upgrade my entire PC at the time so every other change mentioned previously happened recently excluding the GPU obviously.) For this reason I decided to remove my HDD and wipe my SSD for a clean Windows 10 install hoping it would fix the issue.

Currently I’ve tried various things on the old Windows save and on the new, clean one. These include:
-Updating all possible drivers (Realtek, MSI, Intel, Windows etc.) and reverting them to see if any mix of past and updated drivers fixed the issue (currently running the most updated iterations of all drivers.)
-Trying different audio codecs. I tried the integrated Windows audio, Realtek(R) and Realtek High Definition Audio.
-I’ve tried using multiple different headsets and headphones on both the front and back I/Os all having the same muffled effect (I also tried Bluetooth headphones but they were Apple Airpods so I couldn’t feasibly tell if there was any change in quality.
-I disabled and enabled all sorts of combinations of Enhancements on Windows and the integrated Realtek Audio Manager that comes with the MSI Bios.
-I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled everything, the Windows 10 OS, the MSI Bios, all of the software pertaining to audio and their respective drivers.
-Finally I’ve tinkered with both Steelseries Sonar’s equalizer and Dolby Atmos but neither of them truly fixed the underlying issue (muffled and incohesive audio) but they certainly helped stabilize the audio sources so I’ve used them as a temporary remedy.

I am still flabbergasted at the fact that audio has been the most convoluted part of the PC building process, even more so considering that I had faced similar issues before but cannot for the life of me remember how I fixed it! If any of you has any sort of suggestions or possible fixes please let me know, I’m willing to try anything out at this point. I wholeheartedly suspect it has to do something with either the Motherboard or the wretched Realtek drivers but I don’t have any substantial evidence to base these claims off of. I’m still a novice with all of these tech things so any advice will be very appreciated.

I’ll try to respond to any questions as fast as I can in the case I might’ve missed any important details. Thanks in advance :D
Mobo drivers

Chipset
https://download.msi.com/dvr_exe/mb/intel_chipset_600_700.zip

Audio
https://download.msi.com/dvr_exe/mb/realtek_audio_R.zip

Lan
https://download.msi.com/dvr_exe/mb/Intel_Network_WT.zip
 
Hiii! This is my first time asking for help on a public forum so please excuse me if this isn’t the right board to ask this question!

I recently upgraded my PC for the first time in nearly six years and the entire process went over smoothly and with little issues. In regards to performance everything is running flawlessly, temperatures are in check, every game I have tested has run perfectly even after prolonged sessions, everything seemed to fall into place except one little detail… The audio quality has deteriorated to nearly unplayable levels.

I am not an expert with anything relating to audio, I’m no audiophile after all, but the sudden drop in quality is palpable. If I were to describe the sudden shift it would be that the entire experience feels very amalgamated. There is little audio depth in games, footsteps are barely audible, guns and sfx sound “damp” and lack any sort of punch or sharpness, everything seems to be crammed into one jumbled, auditory mess. It’s not “unplayable” by any means but it certainly detracts from the experience and it saps all excitement I’ve had for this build. Again, the performance is immaculate so I do not believe that any of the hardware is faulty.

I’ll list my previous and current specs respectively so you can all gauge if there are any outliers that might be of concern. My previous build was just a prebuilt Dell desktop that I refitted into a NZXT Noctis 450 ATX case and an upgraded Power Supply so I do not have any specifics relating to the previous Motherboard or RAM but I doubt those have anything to do with the issue.

Specs:
-Generic LGA 1151 Socket Dell Motherboard > MSI PRO Z690-A
-Intel Core i7-6700 > Intel Core i5-13600k (Not Overclocked yet)
-Zotac GTX 1060 6GB > MSI RTX 3060 12GB
-Generic DDR4 2133MHz 16GB (2 x 8 GB) > CORSAIR Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200Mhz 32GB (4 x 8 GB)
-MSI MAG Coreliquid 240R V2 AiO Cooler
-Windows 10 running on 256 GB SSD (This one is old so I don’t really remember the brand) + Additional 2 TB Western Digital HDD (Currently unplugged)
-CORSAIR CX750M Power Supply

Funnily enough this wasn’t the first time I’ve confronted this same audio issue but I cannot recall how I fixed it the first time but the fact it happened once already gives me a glimmer of hope that maybe some of you much more deft in this whole PC thing might have a fix that can help. The first time I encountered this was when I soft-reseted my Windows 10 when I upgraded from the GTX 1060 to the RTX 3060 (this upgrade happened nearly a year back but I didn’t have the budget to upgrade my entire PC at the time so every other change mentioned previously happened recently excluding the GPU obviously.) For this reason I decided to remove my HDD and wipe my SSD for a clean Windows 10 install hoping it would fix the issue.

Currently I’ve tried various things on the old Windows save and on the new, clean one. These include:
-Updating all possible drivers (Realtek, MSI, Intel, Windows etc.) and reverting them to see if any mix of past and updated drivers fixed the issue (currently running the most updated iterations of all drivers.)
-Trying different audio codecs. I tried the integrated Windows audio, Realtek(R) and Realtek High Definition Audio.
-I’ve tried using multiple different headsets and headphones on both the front and back I/Os all having the same muffled effect (I also tried Bluetooth headphones but they were Apple Airpods so I couldn’t feasibly tell if there was any change in quality.
-I disabled and enabled all sorts of combinations of Enhancements on Windows and the integrated Realtek Audio Manager that comes with the MSI Bios.
-I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled everything, the Windows 10 OS, the MSI Bios, all of the software pertaining to audio and their respective drivers.
-Finally I’ve tinkered with both Steelseries Sonar’s equalizer and Dolby Atmos but neither of them truly fixed the underlying issue (muffled and incohesive audio) but they certainly helped stabilize the audio sources so I’ve used them as a temporary remedy.

I am still flabbergasted at the fact that audio has been the most convoluted part of the PC building process, even more so considering that I had faced similar issues before but cannot for the life of me remember how I fixed it! If any of you has any sort of suggestions or possible fixes please let me know, I’m willing to try anything out at this point. I wholeheartedly suspect it has to do something with either the Motherboard or the wretched Realtek drivers but I don’t have any substantial evidence to base these claims off of. I’m still a novice with all of these tech things so any advice will be very appreciated.

I’ll try to respond to any questions as fast as I can in the case I might’ve missed any important details. Thanks in advance :D
Sorry I know you said you tried them all but double check to help make sure right drivers to start....


If the audio is the only issue your experiencing, saddly this generally right off the bat says audio chip on the mobo, but that's not always a garentee either. One of the key things to note you said the m.2 is old however much everything may seem to be running smoothly of off it right now. Maybe failing slowly, it can also be as simple as a wire not fully plugged in as much as it looked like it.
 
May 12, 2023
1
0
10
Hiii! This is my first time asking for help on a public forum so please excuse me if this isn’t the right board to ask this question!

I recently upgraded my PC for the first time in nearly six years and the entire process went over smoothly and with little issues. In regards to performance everything is running flawlessly, temperatures are in check, every game I have tested has run perfectly even after prolonged sessions, everything seemed to fall into place except one little detail… The audio quality has deteriorated to nearly unplayable levels.

I am not an expert with anything relating to audio, I’m no audiophile after all, but the sudden drop in quality is palpable. If I were to describe the sudden shift it would be that the entire experience feels very amalgamated. There is little audio depth in games, footsteps are barely audible, guns and sfx sound “damp” and lack any sort of punch or sharpness, everything seems to be crammed into one jumbled, auditory mess. It’s not “unplayable” by any means but it certainly detracts from the experience and it saps all excitement I’ve had for this build. Again, the performance is immaculate so I do not believe that any of the hardware is faulty.

I’ll list my previous and current specs respectively so you can all gauge if there are any outliers that might be of concern. My previous build was just a prebuilt Dell desktop that I refitted into a NZXT Noctis 450 ATX case and an upgraded Power Supply so I do not have any specifics relating to the previous Motherboard or RAM but I doubt those have anything to do with the issue.

Specs:
-Generic LGA 1151 Socket Dell Motherboard > MSI PRO Z690-A
-Intel Core i7-6700 > Intel Core i5-13600k (Not Overclocked yet)
-Zotac GTX 1060 6GB > MSI RTX 3060 12GB
-Generic DDR4 2133MHz 16GB (2 x 8 GB) > CORSAIR Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200Mhz 32GB (4 x 8 GB)
-MSI MAG Coreliquid 240R V2 AiO Cooler
-Windows 10 running on 256 GB SSD (This one is old so I don’t really remember the brand) + Additional 2 TB Western Digital HDD (Currently unplugged)
-CORSAIR CX750M Power Supply

Funnily enough this wasn’t the first time I’ve confronted this same audio issue but I cannot recall how I fixed it the first time but the fact it happened once already gives me a glimmer of hope that maybe some of you much more deft in this whole PC thing might have a fix that can help. The first time I encountered this was when I soft-reseted my Windows 10 when I upgraded from the GTX 1060 to the RTX 3060 (this upgrade happened nearly a year back but I didn’t have the budget to upgrade my entire PC at the time so every other change mentioned previously happened recently excluding the GPU obviously.) For this reason I decided to remove my HDD and wipe my SSD for a clean Windows 10 install hoping it would fix the issue.

Currently I’ve tried various things on the old Windows save and on the new, clean one. These include:
-Updating all possible drivers (Realtek, MSI, Intel, Windows etc.) and reverting them to see if any mix of past and updated drivers fixed the issue (currently running the most updated iterations of all drivers.)
-Trying different audio codecs. I tried the integrated Windows audio, Realtek(R) and Realtek High Definition Audio.
-I’ve tried using multiple different headsets and headphones on both the front and back I/Os all having the same muffled effect (I also tried Bluetooth headphones but they were Apple Airpods so I couldn’t feasibly tell if there was any change in quality.
-I disabled and enabled all sorts of combinations of Enhancements on Windows and the integrated Realtek Audio Manager that comes with the MSI Bios.
-I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled everything, the Windows 10 OS, the MSI Bios, all of the software pertaining to audio and their respective drivers.
-Finally I’ve tinkered with both Steelseries Sonar’s equalizer and Dolby Atmos but neither of them truly fixed the underlying issue (muffled and incohesive audio) but they certainly helped stabilize the audio sources so I’ve used them as a temporary remedy.

I am still flabbergasted at the fact that audio has been the most convoluted part of the PC building process, even more so considering that I had faced similar issues before but cannot for the life of me remember how I fixed it! If any of you has any sort of suggestions or possible fixes please let me know, I’m willing to try anything out at this point. I wholeheartedly suspect it has to do something with either the Motherboard or the wretched Realtek drivers but I don’t have any substantial evidence to base these claims off of. I’m still a novice with all of these tech things so any advice will be very appreciated.

I’ll try to respond to any questions as fast as I can in the case I might’ve missed any important details. Thanks in advance :D
Did you ever find a fix to this?