Audio distorted, tinny, sounds like its underwater or..

Whoops!

here you are, my mistake, heh.

It's probably Steam doing it. Uninstall that to test.

It's good to use services.msc frm the start menu search box to disable NVIDIA 3D Stereoscopic service. You don't need that at all.

You could get rid of the Google Toolbar Notifier in the startup folder of all programs in the start menu, unless you want it for some reason. Same for uTorrent. Get rid of that on the start menu too unless you use it to automatically connect at boot and like that.

Before I uninstall, what makes you think that is the issue? and if it is the case.. how am I supposed to play counterstrike source or any other game that uses steam :/

I have two choices on how to respond. I could either risk the chance of being perceived as arrogant and possibly end up being wrong. Or I could tell you that it would be best to uninstall to test.

I would uninstall to test. That's my advice. It's all I can do.

Haha, take the risk, Id like to know your thoughts. But, I did uninstall and no luck.

If I cannot figure this out by the end of the week I figure I'll go buy a real soundcard and see if I have any luck with that. That or completely reinstall windows.. although its not even a week old install and as you can see I really dont have all that much installed other than little things

I finally found someone else with what I think is the same exact problem I'm having. I did a Windows 7 upgrade from a previous Vista Home Premium install and sometime after that, my audio started sounding distorted. It's more tinny, saturated and overdriven than anything else. Everything except the Windows OS sounds are like this.

I also downloaded a CPU latency tool that shows spikes which coincide with audio dropouts and buzzes.

Anyway, I'm hoping there's a solution to this because I've tried just about everything to fix this issue, including two new sound cards (since returned), updated the chipset drivers, saw if there was a BIOS setting I missed, updated miscellaneous drivers, thought it might be the video card drivers, etc. I've wasted too much time on this and it's been driving me nuts.

Perhaps an actual bios update will cure it.

i was considering a BIOS update, but there have only been 5 bios revisions for my board and none of the revision notes indicate anything regarding audio issues.

glad to hear someone else has the same problem, it is definitely driving me nuts to say the least.

Don't worry about what the notes say. They don't tell anything of what really is going on behind the scenes. Go for it. Apply the latest.

Will do when I get home.

To isiegel, I really used distorted for lack of a better word. Ive tried playing some rock and it actually sounds somewhat listenable, but if I try any hiphop or anything I have it really does sound distorted, certain aspects of the sound become inaudible almost, it kinda clicks and really the best word I can think of is distorted. There is a complete lack of any bass.

If a BIOS update doesnt cure it, im going to install a live copy of linux and see if the same issues arise in linux or not - though you said you had zero problems with vista. I literally JUST built this PC last week, and as such it never had any other operating system installed so I cannot say if it is 100% windows 7 or not. Im pretty saddened to hear that youve been through multiple sound cards and have the same issue.

The real kicker for me though, is that if it is some sort of mobo-windows7 issue, then why was my motherboard, which was released this fall afaik, have a big sticker on it that says "WINDOWS 7 READY!"

argh.