by Mitz Pantic from Tips4pc.com
7 Ways to Troubleshoot PC Sound Issues
You turn on your computer with the intention to listen to some great music or to a watch a super hit movie of the latest release, but suddenly your hope starts to fade away as you realize your computer is not producing any sound! Well, this can happen occasionally and there could be several reasons why this would happen. If you have the patience and a little bit of basic knowledge on computer repair and troubleshooting, often you can fix this sort of problem on your own.
Why Sound Problem Occurs?
Every computer needs a sound processing technology installed or embedded into your system that can modulate and demodulate audio signals of different media into a PC recognizable format. This sound processing technology comes in the forms of a sound card or an integrated sound device. For desktop computers, a separate sound card is normally used and inserted into a PC slot that is attached to the motherboard (main circuit board inside your PC).
In a laptop, there is no sound card, instead they come with a built in sound processing systems within the motherboard. Often that is the reason why you wouldn’t get Hi-Fidelity sounds in laptops because of its limited capability. But in desktops, you can use any type of sound cards based on your needs, and some of the available sound cards today with simulated surround sound capability, crystallizers and dynamic processors can produce amazing sounds of professional studio quality that will rock your home computing environment. You also need great speakers or headphones hooked up into your sound card, so that the sound that is being generated inside the PC could be channeled into your ear with significant enhancement. A sound card generally has several I/O ports and when you are plugging your speaker, you need to make sure it is going into the right port where it is really supposed to go. Otherwise, you would be left with the “sound of silence”!
Main Sound Problems
Root causes for sounds not being generated in your PC are as follows:
✓There is no sound card in your PC, sound card is not properly inserted into the slot, audio cable of the CD/DVD drive is not connected to the sound card or the sound card has gone out of order.
✓Sound drivers are not properly installed in your system.
✓Speakers are not properly connected to the sound card.
✓Speaker is out of order or speaker cables are bad.
✓Speaker or Microphone sound is muted in your sound control panel.
How to Identify and Fix PC Sound Problem?
Different people, based on their level of expertise, will take different measures to try and fix any computer problem. I normally try out the easy and pragmatic steps first than heading for a more complex route immediately. Let’s follow some of the following activities to identify and fix the “no sound” problem of your PC;
#1. A Fresh Restart to Get The Sound Working Again
Always do a fresh restart – It takes care of the problem most of the time.
#2. Check Your Sound Connections
If no use, check that your speakers are connected to the right port in the sound card. Every audio cord, whether it is from the speakers or the headphone, will have at least two cords – a) One output cord to bring sounds from the PC to the speaker so that the speaker can boost it and you can hear what your computer generates and b) One input cord to stream in your voice or any other sound to the PC through a microphone or another external device. Therefore, to hear sound generated by your computer, you need to make sure the output cord (often marked with a headphone symbol on it) is connected to the output port of the sound card.
#3. Is Sound Muted?
If connections are perfect, click on the speaker symbol on your taskbar as shown in image 1 and check that your speakers are not muted. If muted, unselect the mute option – that should bring back the audio feature.
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This excerpt appears with permission from Tips4PC.com.
