How is this possible.

[tp4tissue]

Moved sound card from an x8 slot to a different x1 slot,  these all run off the chipset pch pcie.

Now, the left channel is super low volume, the right is super loud.

Rebooted/ power cycled several times, same issue.


Uninstalled drivers and reinstalled,  issue is gone.  doesn't make any sense, what could've happened to cause this ?

IRQ conflict ? If that's the case shouldn't it not work at all ?  And how could it possibly manifest in this way OVER ANALOG.

Super weird right ?... 

[Leslieann]

The system probably remapped the pinout (no idea why) so it sounded less because it was feeding the wrong speaker.
When you reinstalled it searched and found the correct pinout.

We always call it "Plug and pray".
When it works, it works great, when it doesn't, it doesn't. Kind of like Apple products.

[tp4tissue]

glad nothing blew up. 

Do you mean internal registers, or pcie pin out. I didn't know pcie was remappable, in any case it'd receive digital from PC no ?.

[Leslieann]

Speaker pinout. and yes, I mean the software/registry side, not hardware... Sort of.

I/O these days is mostly software defined, you can arrange it however you want, however that also means someone has to decide what is the default and not all are the same. In your case it may have defaulted to stereo vs 5.1 (or vice versa) or maybe your card's default settings for pinout are not the same as most other cards, I.E. your left could be center on most cards, right could be a sub on others, still odd it detected a change but not the right setting.


And you can remap pcie, at least to an extent.
Not only you can split lanes/slot, you can even dedicate individual lanes to different operating systems and even different users on different operating systems. Technically this is how most ATX boards are (sharing lanes), letting you control it is usually an enterprise feature, though some higher end boards like my ITX board do allow for it as well.

[tp4tissue]

Wonder if perhaps the pcie pins operate at diff voltage or some sort of call to a pwm controller.  Hard to find an explanation for a volume difference.  And I'm sure it's not the balance slider , that was the first thing I checked.

[Leslieann]

Not different voltage, each slot is all the same (assuming  the same # of lanes).
Voltages will not vary depending on pins and such, this would cause no end of problems with 3rd party card makers.

The volume difference is explained by what signals it was sending.
In a surround system each speaker (or pair of speakers) gets a different volume to center the sound (there is fade and balance), even if it was still set to 2channel (stereo) it could still have just been bleed over from the pins it was trying to use. It's also possible the system knew it was wrong and lowered the volume to protect the speakers.  My best guess  is that this is a multi-channel surround card (5.1, 7.1 etc) and it defaulted to surround and your speakers were being used as something other than the primary speakers.

This was simply a software/driver conflict, it had nothing to do with the PCIE port.

[tp4tissue]

Hrrrm...  I did test each channel seperately, and all the left , rear left, front left including center was low volume...

You're right it's probably gonna be a mystery forever.

[pixelpusher]

I read the topic and came here expecting to see a thread on the Russian military campaign into Ukraine.  Guess not.  It's about a sound card.

[treeleaf64]

I read the topic and came here expecting to see a thread on the Russian military campaign into Ukraine.  Guess not.  It's about a sound card.

ME TOO !!! LOL HAHAHAHAAAA

[Leslieann]

I forgot about this being a thing as well.

Windows is just inconsistent as hell.
It was getting better with it being the least problematic with Win8 (probably) but mandatory rolling updates has made it faaaar more crazy on Win10 than even much older systems like XP.

Basically, you can take 4 or more identical computers, load them up, install all the updates and 2 will be perfectly identical while 1 will have one weird oddity and another will have some other minor oddity, only one of which you can tweak and get to match the other two, the last will just be uncooperative and remain an outlier. Even the file count and install size can be different. Reload one of the odd ones and it may do the same, it may match the other odd one, or it may match the other two that match. Swap two GPUs or hard drives (or a sound card) and watch it all change again, swap GPUs and drives together and watch it all change yet again. It's not something a normal user would notice unless you reinstall often or have multiple identical systems but build enough systems and you do.

I can build identical Mac machines, I can build identical Linux machines, I can even do identical Hackintosh, or even other OS's, they don't even have to be side by side in many cases, but with Windows there is always some unknown variable that comes into play and makes them just randomly act different.