Just this morning, my speakers stopped working…they just died… I have no more sound coming out of my computer speakers. It shows everything as working correctly, but I hear nothing… my speakers have the green round wire that goes in the green jack in the back and a USB wire. I tried plugging the USB wire into several of the different USB ports in the back and it doesn’t work on any of them. However when I plug in my headset I can still hear sound on them… so I don’t think it’s my sound card.
I have checked the cables and everything is in working order. I ran a diagnostic and the system says that everything is in working order. I even plugged the speakers into something else and they work fine. My computer is only 2 years old. Still fairly new in the electronic scheme of things. I just don’t have sound coming from the speakers.
It is still probably your sound card, if the sound just cut out; just the circuit that feeds the “line out” jack to the speakers (which I assume are amplified). The proof is that the speakers work fine if you plug them in to another source. There’s really nothing else to go wrong after that, short of something like a virus or disk error or other problem interfering with the device driver for your sound card, and it’s unlikely in my experience that a sound card driver problem would end up with you getting sound out of the one output jack (headphones) but not another (line out).
Especially since I believe the USB connection is just for power (the sound is going through the analog “green” line out cable), and you’ve said you can plug the speakers in to something else (like an MP3 player), which means you left the USB cable plugged in to the computer while putting the 1/8" audio cable into the player instead of the computer, right?
So if that’s true:
it’s not the USB power
it’s not the speakers themselves
it’s not the 1/8" audio cable
it’s very unlikely to be a software error that’s isolated to the line out port of your sound card, and not causing any other problems on your system
Therefore, it’s most likely that the line out port on your sound card is fried for whatever reason (especially if it’s the kind that’s built in to the motherboard and not its own separate card). The good news is, sound cards are cheap, unless you’ve got a 7.1 digital surround sound setup going on, which is probably not the case.
Reboot and see if the problem goes away. Sometimes the driver gets messed up or some OS parameter gets inadvertently miss set. When it happens to me I find a reboot usually fixes it. YMMV.
What OS are you running? I have this problem on my computer running Win 7. If the computer sleeps or hibernates, sometimes I won’t get sound to the speakers, although I do get sound if I plug in a headset. I fix this by either rebooting the computer, or more easily, disable and enable the sound device in HW manager.
I was assuming the OP already tried restarting/rebooting the machine since that’s 5 of the 6 sides on the die that just about any tech support desk uses for front line replies to problems like this :), but yeah, reboot or System Restore (on a Windows computer) to an earlier time when the speakers were definitely working is worth trying.
I’m assuming that the purpose of the USB cable is to power the speakers and that when you say you plug the headphones in, you are using the same green 1/8" stereo jack that you use for the speakers. Finally, when you say you have plugged the speakers into something else, how did you power them? If it was via a USB cable, did you use the same cable?
The only possibility I see, pending your answers, is that the USB cable is bad. I think it’s unlikely that all of your USB ports are bad. However I have had problems with having too many devices plugged into a USB hub resulting in insufficient power to drive an optical scanner.
