My need for having sound through the headset and through the speakers is easy. I play "the game" which is Call of Duty and in game play is better with a headset. I can hear people sneaking up close to me. I can do this with the speaker system but its so loud in game its almost too much sound. ON the other end I also use my Zune and thousands of music tracks I want to play through my speakers, not headset. Gaming through the speakers sometimes can be a little to loud. I have a 5.1 sound system and I would prefer to switch between the headset and physical speakers by as simple as connecting or disconnecting my head set. Hope this helps.
I disabled the headset via a fat finger by right clicking it and selecting Disable in the Sound properties. When I hook the headset back into the machine the machine beeps knowing something hit the USB but I am not able to do anything with it. It will even reinstall if I use a new USB port. It was working fine before this and I messed it all up trying to use my speakers and changing the default via Windows. This is when I accidentally disabled the headset.
My sound card is just the integrated sound card from my motherboard, so Windows is managing it.
GIGABYTE - Product - Motherboard - Overview - GA-M57SLI-S4 (rev. 1.0)
thanks, Brad