Vista - Headphone problems

Speakers and headphones don't work

I got a pair of headphones but they would not work at first. I played around with "Playback Devices" and the Realtek Audio Manager. At various times I either had the speakers working or the headphones, but never both. Somehow along the way I managed to lose the Realtek audio manager ... nowhere to be found anymore. But before I lost it, I set it to play both speakers and headphones at the same time. That is what I would like to be able to do. Right now, I can't even switch from one to the other. For example, I have Speakers set to "Default" but only the headphones are working at this time. Rebooting may set it back to Speakers again.

I can see the Speakers and Headphones by right clicking on the speaker icon and selecting Playback Devices. Once in that window, it appears that both are working fine. I can hear them both when I select "Test."

I haven't even tried to get the headset microphone to work yet.

I'm going to try to install Vista 64 SP2. Maybe that will help. If anyone has any other suggestions please let me know. Thanks.

i dont know if you have noticed but recently realtach have been churning new drivers about twice a month recently , im guessing their having issues with everything , try downloading and installing the latest from their site , no need to uninstall old ones the new drivers come with a very good uninstaller built in (requires reboot)

Realtek

Thanks for your response. I did download the new Realtek codecs, but it made no difference (except that I got the Realtek Audio Manager back). I also installed Vista64 SP2 to no avail. However, I now understand that to switch between speaker and headphone, all I need to do is reset the default audio device and then restart the application (no reboot necessary). This is inconvenient and it does not allow the speakers and headphones to be used at the same time, but it's tolerable. Maybe Windows 7 will improve upon this.