Speaker Driver and Audio Service Weirdness

ericnixmd said:

@GFX I'm glad I'm not alone. Have you reported it to Microsoft via the Feedback Hub?

Not yet. Do they even listen to that thing?

ericnixmd said:

Doing some trial and error here... these issues also seemed to have surfaced around the time I installed Acrobat (the cloud-based subscription version). I disabled the CreativeCloud, Adobe tray icon, etc. startups. Will monitor to see if it has an effect. I'm wondering if it's causing a delay that leads to the audio service not loading.

I cold booted tonight at work and had no problems with the audio service (other than it selecting my Philips SpeechMike as the device; had to select the internal speakers as default after previously selecting the Dell AE515 speakers as default).

Will continue to monitor as n=1 doesn't really mean anything.

Out of curiosity @GFX, do you also have an Adobe Creative Cloud app installed?

Finally, is there a way to select speaker priority? I would like the laptop to default to the Dell AE515 when connected to the dock and default to the Realtek internal speakers when not connected. I never want to hear anything through the speaker in my microphone (Philips SpeechMike).

Yes I do have Adobe Flash CS6 which I installed through Creative Cloud a long time ago.
I think for me the issue started when I was signed up as an Insider, and I remember this problem coming up when I installed one of the preview versions. I was on the Fast release ring so I was getting a new build almost every week, and I thought this was a temporary issue that would get fixed eventually, except it never did.
Now I opted out of the Insider program and running a release version of Windows 10 Pro 1709 (build 16299.371).

I made it a habit to disable almost every startup item that I don't need, but after reading your post I see that I have 2 Adobe services that are set to Automatic startup mode, so I'm curious to know if this is the actual root cause.
Please keep us posted! :)

I disabled the Adobe stuff... didn't help at all.

Eric, I have the same exact issue. Upon logging in, I sometimes get the red X on the speaker icon. Audio works though. If I click and run the troubleshooter, it says my default audio device isn't set. It's weird because #1, yes it is, and #2, I reset it, and still get this error at times. But the troubleshooter simply identifies my correct audio device and everything is normal.

It's so weird! I had a fresh Win10 install a month ago and avoided installing any or many extra drivers or programs. I kept only the necessities on and tested for days. I'll have to look back more, but thought I'd let you know you're not the only one.

I think it's a bug with Windows. For me, it only surfaced with an update last month.

Okay, so don't get your hopes up too much but I think the new April 2018 update may have solved this issue! I installed it yesterday evening and I've been restarting and shutting down just to test this particular issue and it seems to be gone.
But again, it's still to early to tell if it was properly fixed or not but I'm feeling optimistic :)

I think it did too, but then again, I completely wiped my hard disk and reinstalled it as a fresh install. Needed to do it because QuickBooks held onto my old username instead of getting it from my profile. I couldn't uninstall it and it locked up installing an update. Decided to spend 8 hours and set everything up again. Talk about fun (not). At least it's working correctly now.

There's a new setting to select speakers by app. Going to post in another thread about that. Having some issues and not sure if it's supposed to work like I think it is.

This seems to be fixed with v1803. I clean installed, so not sure if it's just v1803 or if it's the clean installation.

Regardless, the new sound features for v1803 are much better. Windows remembers my default devices for when connected to dock, when not connected to dock, with certain microphones etc. I finally got the app specific sound output to work correctly. Now when I dictate into Dragon Medical Practice Edition and tell Dragon I need to correct something, it plays back my dictation through the Philips SpeechMike microphone's speaker instead of the computer speakers. Very handy when I'm listening to music (iTunes, Amazon, Pandora, etc.).

I have a wired microphone I use in the ER and a wireless one at home connected to my dock. When connected to the dock, the app specific sound settings are blank for Dragon. Not sure if I switch it to the wireless microphone if it will turn blank when connected to the wired microphone or if it'll work like the default sound settings remembering which device to default to with/without the dock.