My speakers won't play audio from my PC. Any suggestions?

[Udeh]

I run a home built PC into a Denon AVR-591 via HDMI. The Denon runs to speakers and to a projector (Optoma GT750). Everything was working fine for several months. Today, I can't get audio out of my computer anymore. edit: Windows 8.1. A few notes:

It's not the HDMI cable. It still runs video to the receiver and, ultimately, to the projector. That's fine.

It's not the speaker cable. My blu-ray player still does just fine. I get audio from that as normal.

I've updated all the drivers on my PC. I doubt very much that I missed something.

The PC says that the receiver is receiving audio signals. It even appropriately fluctuates the volume as music changes (I'm using Pandora as a test, and I know a lot of the songs on the station. It's not just Pandora with no audio, though. YouTube, games, Netflix, and a few other sites also fail to provide audio.)

I DID recently mod Skyrim. I used the Steam Workshop to run three audio mods (Sounds of Skyrim: Civilizations, Wilds, and Dungeons). Everything worked fine while I played. When I woke up the next day, I can't get any sound out of my PC anymore. I've tried disabling the mods, deleting them entirely, reinstalling them, restarting the PC, updating drivers, and everything else I can think of. I'm assuming that it's either something weird with either the way the receiver interprets the signal, or the mods might have done something goofy with the PC audio output. I have no idea what else it could even be. I'll be posting to more PC-centered support forums as well, but I'd love to hear if the people knowledgeable about receivers have anything to say.

 

[shadyJ]

How many different sound interfaces are there on your computer? If the default output has changed, you won't get any sound through the older sound output. If you changed drivers recently, that could have changed the default audio output. I trust you have opened up your audio device manager and looked to see which output was set on default?

 

[Udeh]

The receiver is set as default for audio. It's also set as default for communications, but I'm not entirely sure if that's new or if it's relevant. It is the default for everything audio, as far as I can tell. I also have to admit that I'm not sure what you mean by "sound interfaces." I like to think that I'm not dumb, but I'm definitely not very well educated about computers or receivers. I knew essentially nothing at all until I decided to build the computer and started reading about how to do that. I've been using google, but my google-fu has been nearly exhausted. Feel free to assume you're speaking to somebody who has absolutely no idea what they're doing.

edit: And I can't believe I didn't say this before. I'm running Windows 8.1.

 

[shadyJ]

Is the HDMI cable coming from a video card or a motherboard HDMI plug? You need to verify which audio device driver is running as the default, this is what your games will turn to for audio. This should be done in the device manager. At this point I can't really help you very much since I don't know Windows 8 at all, but I assume the device manager is still there. This problem sounds software related in which case you will get better advice from places like Tom's Hardware, sorry.

 

[Udeh]

Is the HDMI cable coming from a video card or a motherboard HDMI plug? You need to verify which audio device driver is running as the default, this is what your games will turn to for audio. This should be done in the device manager. At this point I can't really help you very much since I don't know Windows 8 at all, but I assume the device manager is still there. This problem sounds software related in which case you will get better advice from places like Tom's Hardware, sorry.

It's run through the video card. Incidentally, this morning, I re-enabled audio from the video card again. I've been repeatedly disabling it and enabling it alternately in hopes that it would somehow recognize that something was wrong when it restarts. I did that with a lot of settings, including the receiver's audio input. Anyway, today it worked. Seemingly randomly, it decided that it would now play audio again, even though repeatedly toggling it for the last day and a half hasn't helped at all. So, everything appears to be fine now. Thanks for your time! I'll keep Tom's Hardware in mind for the future as well. I didn't know of the place until now.