A recent upgrade of windows 8 to 8.1 for whatever reason prevented sound through the speakers. However, it would work through my ear buds. I have a Dell E6520 and of course Dell did not have an audio driver for 8.1. I tried the 8.0 driver but no change.
I played around with the diagnostics and troubleshooting tools but they did not find anything.
One interesting possibility came from trying to play the test tones with the audio device.
I received this nice little message:
Failed to play test tone.
A quick check on the Net showed someone else ran into this situation.
The steps to correct this error (at least for my situation):
- Right click the taskbar’s speaker icon and select playback devices(if you don’t have it on the taskbar, use the Sound control panel).
- Select the Speakers /Headphones and click the properties button.
- Click the Advanced tab.
- Click the Restore Defaults.
- Click the Test button and you should have sound
A rather strange problem and I am surprised….well?…not really that an update would do this.
techdork 