Vista - Backround sound normal, talking sound low

Just what the title says. This happened when I was trying to add a sata dvd writer to the pc. Terrible mobo. Asus p5ne. Three sata ports and I get a blue screen if I try to use one with a sata dvd player. I have two hard drives one the old IDE version with the pins, and then another with sata. I can't boot the PC off of the sata cable HD even though that's the one with VISTA ultimate x64

To my problem because days of bull****tin around trying to get the dvd writer to work, I gave up because a $25 writer isn't worth a whole day of messing around.

Anyways, somewhere along the line something went wrong with my audio. I now I only have backround sound with very faint "talking" in things such as movies. MP3's seem to work fine. I had xvid codecs installed. DIVX codecs installed. I didn't uninstall anything. I checked all the sound settings in the control panel and they show the headphone jacks functioning. I installed updated codecs. Still doesn't work. I guess my next guess is to try and reinstall the mobo sound driver again. Although when I go into Devices and try to update it there, it says I have the most updated version.

Anyone else see this problem.