A WTF? Audio problem question

[tim31]

I've googled hard and called everyone I know but can't get a specific answer. The problem is this: when I opened iTunes to throw some music on, the sound came through with the primary channel quiet and the secondary channel loud; so the backing vocals were audible and the lead just barely, and the instrumental was all over the place. I tried a few different tracks to make sure it wasn't one dud, then tried to play a few tracks in WMP. Same result. I inserted an audio CD and played it for the final confirmation: my audio setting have been screwed around with. My daughter keeps playing around with my computer and there's every chance that she's somehow managed to mess around with the sound, but having checked the realtek config as well as the windows one, I can't figure out what. All my drivers are listed as 'working properly'.

Has anyone suffered this before??

[tim31]

I did. I also tested the speakers using the Realtek control board; both sounding off equally. It doesn't appear to be a balance issue; just that the channels have been reversed on stereo music tracks... Very strange.

[Braedley]

Does your sound card support 5.1 output? If so, it may be trying to send sound to a centre channel that doesn't exist. A lot of stereo audio isn't encoded in left and right channels, but rather mono and difference channels (although I don't know what the spec says for MP3). In any case, your sound card will do this automatically and send only the mono channel (and maybe a little bit of the left and right) to the centre speaker.

[tim31]

Scrapped and reinstalled audio drivers, and it fixed the problem. But it doesn't give me an explaination of what went wrong! Hopefully it doesn't recur.