Extremely low sound from earphones...Help!

I have a XFX nForce 680i LT SLI board with onboard Hi-Def. Using Win7 Ultimate 32bit.

I use my Blackberry earphones plugged into the back panel green jack.

Never had any problems with this setup until about a week back.

A week ago, without ANY apparent reason (no new programs/drivers installed), the earphones stop working.
In 'playback devices', it started showing 'Realtek Digital Audio' as the default playback device and 'Speakers' were grayed out and annotated 'not plugged in' even when I plugged in my earphones.

Since then, I have done the following-

1.System restored to a time when the audio was fine.
2.Updated to latest drivers from Realtek.
3.Rolled back, updated to driver version recommended by XFX (not the latest, but still later than my original drivers)
4.Updated my motherboard drivers.

All this to no avail and I was beginning to think that I had some bad hardware...

but then I did manage to partially solve my problem via a software adjustment I read about here...

The Realtek update installed a new version of the HD Audio Manager, where I was able to 'disable front panel jack detection', which resulted in the speakers suddenly becoming enabled.

Sound is now back in my earphones...however- the volume is very, very low.

More searching on this issue led to a lot of stuff about 'needing external amplifiers' and 'onboard audio giving only line- level output'...I dont think that's it, though, as the earphones have worked fine with the same hardware for years now.

The earphones themselves are fine- work great with my laptop and the Blackberry itself. Also, I have made sure all sliders are turned up everywhere and nothing is muted.

Any help is appreciated.

Maguscreed said:

The first thing that comes to mind is that the actual audio jack on your computer has gone bad. Are you plugging into the front audio jack on your case, or directly into the audio device in the back of the computer? ...and have you tried both plugs?

Thanks for your input.

I'm plugging into the rear panel at the back of the case. When I try the front panel, even the low volume sound disappears.
If it was a hardware issue, would the HD Audio Manager tweak have had the effect that it did?

If it is a hardware issue with the jack, I read somewhere that we can reassign the line-out to a different jack....can we?

OK...went in and got my hands dirty.

True enough, front panel is not connected to the board....apparently in my cheap-ass cabinet, the front audio jack has no connectors leading from it that can be plugged in! So there's no way of finding out...

Anyway... any other stuff I can try?

Bump for Hope!!!