Windows 10: Laptop not recognize audio jack anymore, plays through speaker instead

This is the third forum I try to ask for help, hopefully third time is a charm.

So, suddenly, two days ago my laptop stopped recognizing that a earphone jack is plugged in and plays all sounds through the speakers instead.

- Windows 10 v1909 build 18363.752 (was on v1903 yesterday, still the same problem)

- The earphones are fine, I tried 2 different ones and also tried them on other devices, they work.

- The audio jack port appears to be clear on the inside

- IMPORTANT DETAIL: When I boot the computer with the earphones plugged, before Windows loads up I can hear some faint whitenoise in the earphones, meaning that the audio is correctly being playing through them, but as soon as Windows starts loading up, the earphones get muted and all audio is played from the laptop speakers instead. I've been told that you can get white noise before the system loads as the drivers are not active and active noise cancelling is not working yet. Either way this should prove that on a hardware level the jack port works.


ADDITIONALLY

I had my Realtek drivers version 6.0.1.7560 from 15/7/2015. I tried to make the system update them automatically and they went up to version 6.0.1.7629 from 6/10/2015. So they were still 5 years old.

So I manually downloaded and installed the latest available drivers from the Realtek website, version R2.82. This updated the drivers to version 6.0.1.8186 from 14/6/2017, still 3 years old. But apparently they were the latest official ones, so okay, I thought.

But! This made my Realtek HD Audio Manager program disappear. It's not in Control Panel anymore, and it's not in the group of programs that pop up in the Windows task bar when you click on the little arrow in the bottom right of the screen. But I discovered that the files for this program still exist on my computer, in C:\Program Files\Realtek\Audio\HDA. But when I click on any of the four present .exe files, even running them as an admin, nothing happens. They are RAVBg64.exe, RAVCpl64.exe, RtkNGUI64.exe, and RtIUpd64.exe.

Trying to restore the Realtek HD Audio Manager interface, I looked for even newer drivers, and that's when I found your forum and this post here that says that these are the latest, so I downloaded one of those 10.8MB .cab files.

But I can't seem to be able to install this .cab file. I followed this tutorial and tried both option one and option two (the context menu option "Install" and the elevated command prompt), but in both cases I get error 2 inside the command prompt saying that the system cannot find the file specified.

So now I can't even access Realtek HD Audio Manager anymore, and I'm still stressing over not being able to use earphones.

Any help?

:)

 

How to play audio/music through speakers AND bluetooth speakers


I have a pair of Creative T40 speakers plugged into the 3.5mm jack on my laptop. I got hold of a bluetooth speaker and that was recognised straight-away.

I have installed a large monitor (32inch) to the laptop on which I work as well as watch movies and play games. I was wondering if I could setup that audio, be it music, gaming audio or movie audio could be played through BOTH sets of speakers.

The main T40's are on either side of the monitor and I have the bluetooth speaker behind me on a shelf. That would, kind-of, give me surround sound. Or when I have people over I could get better sound if I could just move the bluetooth speaker to a different part of the room.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Thank you.

 

while my laptop is on the docking station it play the audio throught the lap top instead of the speakers

while my laptop is on the docking station it play the audio through the lap top instead of the speakers

 

Laptop speakers and plugged in headphone audio plays at the same time

Just downloaded the most recent Windows 10 update. But now, even when my headphones are plugged in, I get audio from both the headphone and the internal speakers. Instead of a separate "speaker" and "headphone" sections in the sounds menu, it's listed
as "Speaker/Headphone." Surely, this is not a feature people wanted. There is no problem when using Bluetooth headphones, just the audio jack.