Windows 10: Audio issues, seemingly not driver related.

I don't have any issues with Windows 10, other than the PCR500 incompatibility after the Anniversary Update. However, the PCR500 is a discontinued product (discontinued in 2011) and Roland is not supporting any discontinued product for Windows 10.

Other than the noted, all my recording studio software and hardware is compatible with Win 10 and my audio latency is even improved.

 

Well, I booted today with the webcam unplugged, still no audio. I reboot my PC, (which was often helping in the earlier days of the error) power cycled my AV receiver (which has helped once or twice), double and triple checked my sound settings just to make sure they've stayed the same.

Here's a screenshot of the volume mixer too, those green meters bouncing up and down as if everything is working perfectly (of which the troubleshooter has been believing)

 

So, I ran the sound troubleshooter again, just because I could. This was after I had plugged in and then removed a pair of USB headphones.

I get this response.





HDMI audio is definitely set as the default, and the sound settings are telling me that its connected to the AV Receiver, so now the troubleshooter is obviously lying to me in a completely different way than before. I ran this again just to be sure, and got identical results.





So here it is trying to tell me it's been looking for the headphones, of which it isn't set to use at the moment. Oddly enough, these are almost never used, especially during boot, so that doesn't really help the lack of audio at boot crisis, except that perhaps low-level communications are perhaps erratic, or non-existent.

So I plug the USB headphones back in to see if troubleshooter does anything differently, and it now asks what it is I want to troubleshoot. Either the USB headphones, or the analogue audio outputs that are quite clearly DISABLED. (Of which troubleshooter would probably suggest I enable it I guess, so that makes some sense.)
However, when using HDMI audio, it never thought twice to troubleshoot any other output other than the one I was using at that time...






I select headphones for the troubleshooting, and it tells me to turn off sound effects and enhancements. These have and never were turned on. I do not believe in such things. I did tick the "disable all" box just to make sure, but a re-run of the troubleshooter suggests once again that I should turn them off, of which they are turned off...

 

So, some hour or two later with no audio, I've done a hard reboot, the troubleshooter is still informing me "Device not plugged in" referring to the headphones or the analogue audio. HDMI audio is still the default, and the sounds settings are telling me its connected to the AV Receiver (Onkyo) "TX-SR309".

I could reinstall the drivers, but I really don't see how that's supposed to help anything. It's certainly not a fix, and should it work, I doubt it will stay working for very long, perhaps until the next time I boot.

Edit: Headphones are now working, only if I open sound settings and set them as the default. Otherwise with the headphones plugged in, HDMI is still the default output, and it claims to be playing out of that instead.

Oh, and with the headphones plugged in, I get a "safely remove and eject media" symbol in the task bar.

It just makes absolutely no sense the deeper I look into it.

 

There would seem to be something in startup that is causing this. I would temporarily disable items (maybe one at a time) in the startup and then reboot. This is time consuming but may lead to what is causing your problem. I would start with programs such as Steam, any browser that is auto starting, Skype, etc. Get it down to minimal startup, for testing.