Solved Suddenly in mono sound?

[richcane]

My work laptop, which is a HP EliteBook 8570w using the IDT HD Audio driver, suddenly switched to mono sound the other day. Spent ages trying to fix it to no avail, and today I decided to reinstall the driver. After reinstalling the driver it was instantly obvious that it hadn't fixed the issue, but on further inspection I realised that rather than just outputting in mono, it now only plays the left channel through the right earphone and the right channel is not outputted at all.

Any advice? I obviously can't just reinstall windows.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

My immediate reaction would be to do a System Restore to a point in time when things were OK, not mono.

 

[richcane]

If I was on my own machine that is what I would do.

 

[richcane]

So I had a bit of a f*ck it moment and did it anyway, restored to a few days after I got the laptop at which point the sound was fine, still no dice.

Edit: Just tested, at least it's back in actual mono now playing both channels through the right earphone.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I just looked through all of my audio settings in Control Panel and didn't see anything that would allow me to deliberately choose mono. I have Realtek audio, not IDT.

Do you see any setting where you could choose mono if you actually wanted mono?

I assume you get mono, regardless of whether you are using any particular set of headphones or speakers?

What precludes you from running System Restore on a work laptop?

I guess it could be a hardware failure, possibly a bad cable connector that now only allows mono.

Other than that, I'm out of ideas.

 

[richcane]

I just looked through all of my audio settings in Control Panel and didn't see anything that would allow me to deliberately choose mono. I have Realtek audio, not IDT.

Do you see any setting where you could choose mono if you actually wanted mono?

I assume you get mono, regardless of whether you are using any particular set of headphones or speakers?

What precludes you from running System Restore on a work laptop?

I guess it could be a hardware failure, possibly a bad cable connector that now only allows mono.

Other than that, I'm out of ideas.

Nowhere to choose mono, and yes I get mono in all circumstances as far as I can tell. These headphones are brand new, as is the laptop, so I'm doubtful that it's a hardware failure.

I'm a software developer amongst other roles, so a lot of different software gets installed all the time. That's why I didn't want to do it, but I looked at affected programs and it didn't really matter, so...

As am I ...


I've had this issue before with RealTek, it's easier to fix with that. Never used IDT before. It has an odd controller called SRS HD Audio as well, which appears to act as a fairly pointless replacement for Windows' own sound settings, but I can't find a way to uninstall it as it appears to be bundled with the IDT driver.

 

[richcane]

Turns out those brand new headphones were broken. That's annoying.