Steam Deck Windows Audio Drivers

[Normando Chapman]

Duringthe installation, I noticed my sound icon said that I'd lost my sound, but it came back again so I took no notice of it - until the first time I heard the awful tinny sound my computer now produces. Rather than using my speakers (3.5mm connection to the jack port behind my PC) with the onboard sound drivers, it seems the update has decided to use the woeful, despicable built-in speakers on my monitor, running AMD's drivers.

I've been to my sound control panel in an attempt to re-select my speakers, but lo they are nowhere to be seen. The realtek drivers in device manager also seem to have disappeared, replaced with AMD's, and leaving no sign of my speakers anywhere to be found. I have tried installing new devices in device manager, but they don't show. I've looked through my playback devices in sound settings (yes, even those hidden by 'disconnected' or 'disabled') and they still don't show. I've even been to my bios and checked for the onboard sound system, to check it's enabled. It is. Yet I still cannot connect to the speakers that until this update worked perfectly every single time.

Needless to say this is putting me off ever going near anything AMD ever again at this point, but if anyone can provide an answer for me to get my sound quality back, I would be grateful for anything you have.

While trawling my device manager I noticed a system device (high definition audio bus, I think) was highlighted as faulty. Don't ask me why. I searched for a driver update, it came through and now the sound panel recognises my speakers once more.

I would try to install the Motherboard's Audio drivers again and see if Windows now recognizes your Motherboard drivers and your connected Audio default Device is showing and you can enable it in Windows Sound Panel.

NOTE: When you installed the AMD Driver package it shouldn't have removed the Motherboard's Realtek HD Audio or disabled it. In Sound Panel it should show enabled any Audio devices connected to the GPU card (your Monitor speakers) and any Audio devices (Plug-in Speakers) enabled connected to the Motherboard's Audio outputs.

Essentially, yes, the audio panel from the motherboard is getting me nowhere. My USB Bluetooth works for my headset, but the physical audio ports don't give me anything, except the general static of plugging them in. The speakers do work in other devices, so they're functioning fine, but my motherboard is just not even aware of them since the AMD update, regardless of the port I use.

I have been to my motherboard's download page, yes, I downloaded their drivers, but it made no difference. Following that, I uninstalled the AMD drivers completely and reinstalled my motherboard drivers, but that still didn't take. No matter how much I disable or uninstall the AMD drivers, the Realtek drivers just don't appear again. I really don't know why.

I haven't updated my BIOS, it's not something I'm familiar with so I've been trying every other avenue first. Looking at the support page, I find I am running an older BIOS version, but I've been leaving that as a last resort.

If nothing else, it seems I'm going to need to invest in some new speakers, but I'll keep banging my head against the wall for now if anyone else has any ideas they can throw my way. I'd appreciate it.

I know there are adapters that convert USB>3.5MM Audio. You can try that to see if your speakers work with your motherboard. In case you can't get the Motherboard Audio to work (Possibly defective Motherboard).

Is it possible to run DXDIAG.exe and save the DXDIAG.txt file and upload it to your next reply. Maybe it might indicate what is wrong with your Audio and will show which files (Windows and Non-Windows files) that are having problems.

Just had the same problem for the last hour. after installing a radeon rx550 w/ adrenaline, it hijacked the sound from my 7.1 soundblaster soundcard, deleted it from my sys & changed it to my samsung tv (im watching on a 76" tv... that has crappy sound which is why i have an audio receiver!)

Mine had TWO instances, in conflict. I've uninstalled one of them, deleting driver when prompted. For the one that remained, updated the driver. After this step sound came back on and sound devices appeared once again in Sound, Video and Game Controllers. Hope this helps somebody! All the best!!!

Have another solution. Nothing helped me from the previous answers. I had upgraded my AMD drivers to the newest 20.12 and HDMI Audio to my TV disappeared. The solution for me was to downgrade to my last driver version (as far as I remember) 18.1.1 -notes/rn-rad-win-18-1-1. Maybe I will be able to upgrade to a higher 18.xx version but I don't want to take that risk anymore.

AMD needs to absolutely remove or make audio drivers an optional part of their driver package. The issues with audio affect my system every time I install a driver since moving to AMD earlier this year. I've tried their "Vote on features" tool built into the driver but it is very specific to what it allows us to vote on, and therefore is not very useful. I've run out of ideas how to suggest these things to their driver team, if anyone has something new to try please speak up and let's collaborate.

its not just AMD. its most if not all graphics card manufacturers now. the solution isnt hard to fix with some googling. i laid out exactly how to fi x the issue in a prior post. dont hold your breath for ANY changes from AMD..

My solution was to go to the device manager, which can be found by simply searching in the start menu. select your computer, it should be the top option. Then click the action tab at the top and select scan for hardware changes. Everything came back after that.

I found another workaround on my system that appears to have solved the random USB sounds it was making: similar to the solution above except in device manager I uninstall the AMD devices and choose to "delete driver files for those devices" when it asks.

This all stems from AMD's insistence to include their own audio drivers in the Adrenalin driver package. If AMD would recognize this and make the audio portion an OPTIONAL install during a driver upgrade/downgrade we'd all be better off!!

Update: The new adrenalin version 23.2.1 fixes the issue with sound (I "clean installed" it and kept my settings). However windows is still updating it's own driver over it after installation XD so you just have to "back" it in device manager (which is what I did) and it all works fine.

I just had a similar problem I'm working on a (relatively) old Windows 7 system which has an AMD processor, AMD graphics on the mother board (not being used), a Radeon HD 6450 OEM card which feeds video and audio through an HDMI connection, and also Realtek built-in audio. It hadn't been updated for some time when it came to me, but it was working reasonably well: I could direct audio output to either the AMD HDMI device or the Realtek speakers (or both). But it was due for an upgrade so I ran whql-win8.1-win7-catalyst-15.7.1-oct30.exe . This made some significant improvements to the video graphics: but, as others have noted, the HDMI audio output stopped. The Sound Playback Devices allowed me to select the default device, but it would not output anything. Running "test" said that the device could not be setup or tested because some other application was using it: but there was none.

I tried the fixes other people have, such as rolling back the driver to an earlier version (according to Device Manager), but that didn't fix the problem. I tried de-installing the device, but it always came back with the same driver and the same problem of no sound. When I try Update Driver it says I have the latest version. They only fix I could find was to use System Restore to roll back to the restore point I had created before installing Catalyst.

I've seen a web article that said to install Adrenalin using a custom install to only update the drivers I want. This was an article about installing only the audio driver, but I would want to install everything EXCEPT the audio driver. However, my system is apparently too old to use Adrenalin at all.

Could this be done with Catalyst? I don't remember being given an opportunity to select what Catalyst installs. Alternatively, is there another way to update just the graphics / video software and leave the audio driver alone? Or, is there a way to manually get the AMD HDMI audio device to use the current Windows Driver? As far as I can tell from going through this discussion, the fixes that worked for others didn't work when I tried them, but I'm open to any suggestions.

On Yamaha Steinberg usb driver ive setup 192kHz, superspeed usb 3.1 gen 1

ASIO: Mode Standard, Buffer Size 512 samples, input 6ms, output 7ms ( i dont really know what this setting do so i dont play with it) (i suppose its for recording things from XLR to Cubase LE AI Elements 12?)

its definitely not the fault of the computer jamming, its a fairly efficient unit. for example, once the sound jammed so much that no video on yt or via VLC or music on AIMP wanted to play, just either the program did not turn on or the movie was buffered endlessly, after disconnecting the UR22C in a second the problem disappeared

Windows detects it in 24bits not 32bits, but i can setup AIMP in 32bit, idk im green sorry.

I do not know if I wrote all the important information, I will try to answer all questions. Thank you very much in advance for any help.

To be honest, this sounds like there is something wrong with your system.

We had some reports about obscure system tools and tuning utilities that caused this kind of behavior.

And make sure that no sound enhancer is active.

Normally these are not needed with USB audio interfaces.

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