Different sound levels. onboard and sound card

[PastranA]

heyas, yesterday for some reason my sound plays at different levels and not very good quality. what i mean is you will be able to hear the music in a song but the singing is very low. on a tv show all background noises were okay but the people talking you have to concentrate so hard just to hear something and even then its so low you cant make out what they are saying

i am using headphones, some verbatim ones nothing special but they have always been fine which is making me think its not the headphones. it does this with onboard sound the most, it doesnt go nearly as loud as it used to even the background noises are quite low at high volume. the sound card does a bit better at hearing things but the quality it comes out sounds terrible

the onboard sound is called a 'soundmax' or something im not really sure i couldnt work it out sorry and the sound card is a SBlive 5.1. the motherboad is ASUS a7s8x-mx. also i have gone through all the properties they all look fine and nothing has been changed

i hope this is enough info if you need more i will do my best to get it!

thanks guys

p.s if someone could tell me how to default every folder i go into in my computer to be shown as 'details' and not 'tiles' or 'thumbnails' that would be great!

edit: i just did a system restore that didnt do anything and i also notcied that the noises windows makes when it turns on and off sound fine for some reason

[DanU]

Are you using the on-board sound or the SB live soundcard? You should disable your on-board sound in the BIOS if you're going to use a separate sound card like the SB life.

[PastranA]

im using the onboard sound most of the time and i am at the moment

with them both enabled there has never been any trouble before this

[Peter M]

Make sure your sound solution is correctly set to the kind of speaker setup you have (stereo, 2.1, four-channel, 5.1, etc.)

By your description, it looks like you've set it up to use a "center" speaker that isn't actually connected.

[~~Maverick~~]

-test outputs with another pair of headphones or speakers (if you do not have 2nd pair you can always take use aux input on your HiFi
-if using Live : disable onboard in bios.
-if using onboard : disable Live in device manager.
-reinstall drivers for both cards
-select appropriate speaker setting : Peter might be right.