Intermittent sound on new installaton with new mobo

Hi all,

Last weekend I upgrade my computer with a new mobo as well as a new case. This case front panel jacks for headphones and a microphone, which is the main reason why I bought it.

Case : CoolerMaster 690 USB 3.0 edition
MOBO : Asus M5A97 R2.0

The case and mobo offered two choice for connecting the front panel : HD Audio and AC97. I chose to plug in the HD Audio. One thing is clear, my speakers are fine. When I go into the Realtek audio manager and click on the "Test" button I can hear sound coming out of the left then another on the right.

When I play a game and plug in my headset in the front panel (the headset has only one connector so it came with a splitter to separate the microphone from the speakers) the sound is fine but once I unplug it that is when I lose sound altogether.

Yesterday I found a setting in the Realtek audio manage that has the following two options
-Mute the rear output device, when a front headphone is plugged in
-Make front and rear output devices playback two different audio streams simultaneously

If I uncheck one option and choose the other I will quickly get a screen that says : "Reloading audio devices", so yesterday when I fiddle with those two the sound seemed to come back when I select the second option and then come back to the first. Not only did the second option never worked but now switching between the two doesn't have any effect anymore.

Any ideas?

Thanks

I forgot to mention that I also installed Razer Surround and it was set to the optical connection, now that I 've set it to the "speakers" I don't lose sound if I plug/unplug my headset in the front panel.

Here's what I found, if I set the option in the Realtek manager to the second option it will create and additionnal option in the Razer called "Realtek HD audio 2nd Output". When I revert to the first option in the Realtek panel the new option in the Razer panel disappears and, instead of reverting to my "speakers" it reverts to the option that was above the newly created one which was for the Digital Output and thus made me lose sound.

Come to think of it why would I want to have two different audio streams for the front and back panel?

Thanks