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[neal333]

I recently purchased and recapped some old Technics speakers and was getting a fantastic sound out of my system despite running an old Asus Xonar DX sound card. I run through an old Rotel amp. Then everything went backwards, harsher trebles in particular. I was just on the point of opening up the Technics to check my soldering, when I checked and found that Windows updates had reinstalled all the old sound devices and drivers that I had disabled - Intel, Nvidia and Realtek, all now enabled alongside the default Asus device. Realtek just kept on reinstalling, starting whatever. Windows updates had put Realtek back as a start-up service. I managed to disable this and the device in device manager and finally managed to stop it loading.

Despite the Asus card being the default audio device all along (Wasapi in MC), I'm now back to perfection. I wouldn't say I have goldenears, but the difference is clearly noticeable, different soundstage, all harshness vanished, less of an artifical separation. The Realtek driver seemed to have been getting in there somehow, despite not being selected as an audio device. I presume I am now using the native Windows 10 audio drivers.

So pleased that I have got my sound back. I thought I would post.

[RoderickGI]

Did you disable the onboard sound in the motherboard BIOS? Most allow that, and that should ensure you don't get a reoccurrence.

Windows will change the default audio device on updates sometimes. It is a pain. But that really shouldn't matter if you have MC set to play to the ASUS card via WASAPI, as the default audio device doesn't get touched. It could be the onboard sound and MC shouldn't care.

Put another way, don't set MC to output to the Windows Default Audio device, but explicitly set it to the device you want to play to. It sounds like you have done that, and still had this issue, which is very strange. Windows!

Oh, also set the device (ASUS) to Exclusive Mode, so you are using WASAPI Exclusive. That will stop Windows trying to play system sounds to the default Windows audio device while you are playing from MC. If MC and Windows are pointed to the same audio device, Exclusive Mode should fix issues as well.