I recently transferred all games over to this new computer and have been checking how the games are running.

Torchlight, Fallout, and Stronghold all play the music fine but voices in intros are absent or faint and distorted. Sound effects, like gun fire in Torchlight are gone.

I have re-installed the Galaxy client and one of the games (Torchlight) but that did not help.

I had a very similar problem with Fallout 3 on Steam client & I remember going into config and changing some in game sound settings. Could GoG be the problem or is it something I did in the transfer?

Thanks!

Asus Z170 mobo
GeForce 970

Any chance it could be a driver problem? Did you get the latest ones for your sound card? (I assume you're using the one that came with your mobo?)

Your question made me look in Device Manager where there is more than I expected to see. Maybe there's a conflict?

It lists under 'Sound, video and game controllers':

- NVIDIA High Definition Audio
- NVIDIA Virtual Audio Device (Wave Extensible) (WDM)
- Razor Surround Audio Contoller
- Realtek High Definition Audio

Must have installed the Razor one when I was messing with their Synapse driver app. I dont like the way its always looking for my cloud when I don't have a cloud. lol

Realtek is up to date.

Maybe I will try disabling the Razor. I need the NVIDIA ones I think?

Thanks!

edit: nope, disabling Razor sound didn't do it

Right click the speaker icon on the lower right, then pick playback devices. What is your default playback device?

I go into device manager and disable everything but my sound device (Realtek) because I will never play sound through any other device like HDMI.

Make sure that your sound card hardware is configured in Windows properly for the number of speakers you are using. For example, if configured for 4 speakers and you only have 2 connected currently, depending on the hardware it may expose this to games and they may attempt to use 4-way sound but you'll only hear 2 speakers and the volume will be adjusted for 4.

In addition to that, there are some buggy drivers out there for Realtek and possibly other onboard audio where it does not tell the system how speakers are configured properly. This allegedly is what caused the cut scenes in The Witcher 3 to have really quiet voice acting while the rest of the game seemed to work fine.

You mention you have Realtek hardware so that could be the problem. What's odd is that The Witcher 3 is the only game I've ever experienced this particular problem in and they might have worked around it in a game patch somehow as I don't recall it doing this after a certain point however I can't be sure without checking.

If you have multiple sound hardware, try disabling the Realtek and/or setting other hardware as the default Windows sound device, and moving the speakers to that card.

Hope this helps.

I have:

- Speakers (Realtek HD Audio) this powers headphones
- Realtek Digital Output - this goes to the surround sound amp via Toslink cable

This is all I want/need

I just discovered that the sound works perfectly when I use the surround sound amp. Its just the headphones where I have the playback issue, so obviously on my end. I tried some settings changes in the Asus sound manager for the headphone port but that did not help.

So there is a sound configuration native to Windows 10 that I need to get in to?

EDIT: In the Asus Sound Manager, when using headphones, if I set the balance slider all the way to the right OR the left I get the missing sound effects & voices back! lol

Got any idea why that would be or anything I can do other than just make the setting when I want to play certain games?

Thanks!

OK, I set the Speaker Config to 7.1 for the headphones in The Asus audio panel & all is working great so problem solved I guess!

Thanks guys!

Sound hardware comes with it's own custom control panel, which is where you configure the speaker configuration. There should be a Realtek audio icon in the systray. I'm not familiar with Windows 10 specifically so I can't give specific advice for that however. When using headphones surround sound wont work but if configured it may still be exposed to applications so you may need to set up multiple audio profiles and switch between them. Ideally the audio hardware would switch this automatically when you plug the headphones in. My Realtek applet detects when I plug in or remove audio cables automatically and adjusts for it, however I'm not sure if it handles the surround sound issue correctly or not.

Yes, there's a Realek icon in the tray with a link to Sound Manager which opens the Asus HD Audio window with all the options. It did seem odd to me that surround sound should work for headphones so I had tried stereo. However I have now discovered that the only setting that does seem to work in all cases, with all games and stuff, is 7.1 surround sound.

Interesting, I didn't even know that every time I wanted to change from headphones to amplifier I would not necessarily have to address the Audio Devices window to change drivers. I'm coming from over 15 years of using a Mac & you always had to tell it in System Preferences which audio device you wanted.

However, I think I would rather leave the headphones plugged in & make the few quick clicks than have to move my chair & reach around to the back of the computer to unplug them. :)

Thanks!