Windows 10, no audio.

[reaper_tbs]

Hi all,

I'm experiencing a particularly frustrating issue at present.

I recently upgraded my main PC, which i use primarily for a mixture of music production and gaming, thanks to easily swappable hard drives depending on what i'm using it for that day.

While using it for music production one night, i turned it off, went to sleep, woke up, went to work, and came back home only to find that upon booting to windows, there was no sound. I checked all drivers, i rebooted, i checked if my interface was plugged in correctly, nothing had changed. No windows or 3rd party updates had been scheduled or automatically installed, and the PC was completely powered down anyway, preventing that from being possible regardless.

I always make sure i have to manually connect to the WiFi so as to prevent any updates from suddenly happening upon booting, and i hadn't done that by this point either.

I've subsequently checked, re-checked, and triple checked all drivers which are there, or should be there, and nothing seems askew. I've uninstalled, reinstalled, updated, removed, checked the bios settings, attempted to bypass via the interface's independent ASIO drivers, all to no avail. No sound functionality is present, whether it's windows default, interface, or anything in between. Bluetooth also doesn't bypass this issue.

I tried reinstalling and updating mobo drivers too, again to no avail.

I may have missed some things, as I'm extremely tired and frustrated right now, so you'll have to excuse me.

My setup is on my profile, only difference being when i swap hard drives i go between windows 10 home, and windows 10 pro.

Given that making music is the majority of what i use to retain my sanity, any help or ideas are appreciated!

[reaper_tbs]

Ah, my bad. Specs don't fit in the specs section, haha.

Here's the spec sheet anyway. There may be something conflicting that you guys pick up on which i didn't.



Corsair Graphite 780T Full Tower (Black)
------------------------------------------------------------------
Corsair H110i GTX Liquid Cooling
------------------------------------------------------------------
Intel Core i7 7700k
Asus ROG Strix Z270F
Corsair Vengeance 3200MHz DDR4, 64GB (4x16GB)
Asus ROG Strix GTX 1070 (2x8GB - SLI)
------------------------------------------------------------------
Focusrite Scarlett Solo 2i2 USB Interface (Up to date ASIO)
Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 USB Interface (2nd most recent ASIO, deliberately.)
Asus Xonar Essence STX Internal Sound Card
------------------------------------------------------------------
ASUS AC1900 USB 3.0 WiFi Adapter
------------------------------------------------------------------
Seagate Firecuda 2.5" SSHD (4x2TB)
Samsung 850 EVO SSD (2x1TB)
Samsung 960 EVO M.2 (2x500GB)
Orico 5 Bay USB 3.0 RAID HDD Enclosure
Seagate USB 3.0 External HDD (2x4TB)
------------------------------------------------------------------
FL Studio 12
Windows 10 Home
Windows 10 Pro
------------------------------------------------------------------
Samsung S32D850T Monitor (2x32")
Razer Deathadder
Microsoft Basic Media Keyboard (?)
------------------------------------------------------------------
Mackie HR824 MK2 Studio Monitor (2x8")
Mackie MR6 MK3 Studio Monitor (2x6")
------------------------------------------------------------------

[reaper_tbs]

Wow... So, it's fixed.

I tried everything short of burning my house to the ground, and what fixed it was as follows:

Open Admin Command Prompt.

"Net localgroup administrators /add localservice"

Wow. Just... A very bittersweet "Wow".

Anyway, thanks guys!

[Mark.]

don't see the connection between your command prompt and the return of sound myself, but *censored*, a win is a win.


so you would have sound on one of those HD caddies but not the other?
for example, on Win10 Home but not Win10 Pro?

[Geek-9pm]

From dictation. Please excuse miss snakes.
Just an afterthought. You may have had a hardware failure that healed itself. It happens. Here is why I say this.
It is extremely unlikely that local services would be turned off on two different systems at the same time. There is no way that a command you give while running one system was somehow fly through space and get into your other hard drive. It is much more likely that you have a piece of hardware that has become intermittent.
So make a note in your personal logbook encases comes back again sometime. My best guess is you have a cable that is broken. What I mean to say is almost broken. It still makes contact, but once in a while it will either short out the audio or it will fail to make the connection. What kind of loud speakers or headphones are you using? If you have an external amplified loudspeaker, you need to check it thoroughly to make sure that it always works reliably. And of course, you should always have a pair of headphones handy. But since you said you into music and stuff like that, I would suppose you already have more than one pair of headphones available.

That's all I had to say. 
EDIT:Google 'Windows 10 audio goes on and off' and find many report the audio goes off and latter comes back on. Some say it is a side effect of some third-party audio players. Here is one of many:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-hardware/display-off-takes-all-audio-with-it-in-windows-10/98d4f468-e4de-4701-8502-f58c7354fccd?auth=1
Check it out.

[reaper_tbs]

Hey there.

So, upon further inspection:

don't see the connection between your command prompt and the return of sound myself, but *censored*, a win is a win.


so you would have sound on one of those HD caddies but not the other?
for example, on Win10 Home but not Win10 Pro?

I have one set of the Firecuda drives which i use exclusively for Win 10 Home, and another set of 4 which i use exclusively for Win 10 Pro.

The issue persisted across both sets. The speakers mentioned above are independently powered. The reason i didn't consider damage to those speakers or cables being the issue is because when used only within my production software, certain plugins were usable and consistently worked with perfect clarity, while nothing else did. Each of the plugins that worked was relatively new, so I now think this may have been a prioritisation issue thanks to an update a while before this which was installed on both versions of Windows and somehow didn't get the chance to affect the newly installed plugins.

From dictation. Please excuse miss snakes.
Just an afterthought. You may have had a hardware failure that healed itself. It happens. Here is why I say this.
It is extremely unlikely that local services would be turned off on two different systems at the same time. There is no way that a command you give while running one system was somehow fly through space and get into your other hard drive. It is much more likely that you have a piece of hardware that has become intermittent.
So make a note in your personal logbook encases comes back again sometime. My best guess is you have a cable that is broken. What I mean to say is almost broken. It still makes contact, but once in a while it will either short out the audio or it will fail to make the connection. What kind of loud speakers or headphones are you using? If you have an external amplified loudspeaker, you need to check it thoroughly to make sure that it always works reliably. And of course, you should always have a pair of headphones handy. But since you said you into music and stuff like that, I would suppose you already have more than one pair of headphones available.

That's all I had to say. 
EDIT:Google 'Windows 10 audio goes on and off' and find many report the audio goes off and latter comes back on. Some say it is a side effect of some third-party audio players. Here is one of many:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-hardware/display-off-takes-all-audio-with-it-in-windows-10/98d4f468-e4de-4701-8502-f58c7354fccd?auth=1
Check it out.

In response to this:

I've since checked a few things in my house, and it seems that while having that room converted to a studio, something must not have been grounded correctly. The issue was never noticeable in the past, but the power doesn't appear too stable either. If there are any hardware faults, this could be the cause. Having said that, i've found no such faults.

I've also checked the integrity of all cables since, and haven't found any issues with anything aside from one or two XLR and TRS cables, which i just swapped out for new ones.

It's irritating what a simple fix it was, but it's better than needing to replace a whole heap of expensive stuff

[Mark.]

we have to take the simple ones when we can, even if they are inexplainable.
cause as sure as the world is round, your next issue won't be as simple.

[Geek-9pm]

Now I think it is not the hardware.
When you have a number of things that want to do audio, something can happen. It is not the drivers, it is a software compatibility issue.
An example of such is when you have a program that thinks it is the only one that can get audio from a MP3 or WAV file.  In that instance, you have to get rid of the program that wants to be the boss.