Quiet audio in Win98

[ironwill99]

I have a customer who recently upgraded her mother board and now she can barely hear the audio from her speakers and none at all from her head phones. I walked her through checking the multimedia properties and double checked her audio connections. She is using the onboard VIA audio chip and non-amplified speakers. I beleve the mother board is a Biostar M7VIG if that helps. Any idea what could be causing this?

Thanks!

[Orangeman]

I would check for any upgraded patches and drivers. Many motherboards provide this for their audio systems.

[Zerotech]

The giveaway here is when you mentioned non -amplified speakers. Only old ISA sound cards have built-in amplifiers. On-board sound is line-level and requires amplified speakers (headphone response varies from set to set, but works best plugged into the headphone jack of amplified speakers).
A basic set of powered speakers can be had for $5-$10, a minimal upgrade cost.

[ironwill99]

Originally posted by Zerotech
The giveaway here is when you mentioned non -amplified speakers. Only old ISA sound cards have built-in amplifiers. On-board sound is line-level and requires amplified speakers (headphone response varies from set to set, but works best plugged into the headphone jack of amplified speakers).
A basic set of powered speakers can be had for $5-$10, a minimal upgrade cost.

Normaly I would agree with you except that I plug my headphones into my onboard audio jack on my own PC and it works fine for me. As far as drivers go, I know she has installed the drivers that came with the motherboard. Maybe a driver update will fix the problem. I was just curious if anyone else has ever heard of this.

[NooNoo]

Have you had her try headphones?

[Atodini]

You definitely need amplified speakers on this board!! Tried out the one I have in stock, (was building it into a machine anyway) - almost inaudible on a set of passive (non-amplified) walkman speakers, fine with normal amplified speakers. Admittedly the OS is XP Home but this really shouldn't make much difference.

The audio output is simply not high enough to drive passive speakers!

Headphones worked fine though.....but they would. As a general rule you need 0.2 volts to drive headphones / amplified speakers but nearer 2 volts to drive non-amplified. Most PCI audio cards and, I presume onboard audio's would probably need amplified speakers as the output is taken directly off the audio chip.

As was stated earlier, only older ISA audio cards have on board power amplifiers.

She needs to buy new speakers!

John

[ironwill99]

Ok I will tell her to get some new speakers and hope that fixes her problem. I just wanted to mae sure this wasn't some sort of drivet or complicated registry issue. Thanks alot everyone. Have a nice day.