Windows 8 and Realtek HD audio ‘No sound after sleep’ problem – no reboot fix.

Many are currently having a problem with Realtek HD audio not working after resuming from sleep in Windows 8. The current fix of re-booting is a pain but I found a reliable way to get it working without a reboot

There is an argument between Microsux and Realtek at the moment over who is to blame so I don’t see a fix coming very soon.  From this link

“Bug report submitted to Realtek, and they have replied stating that the problem is with Windows 8, since the driver works fine on previous versions of Windows.”

1) Right click the speaker icon in systray (desktop mode) and select ‘Playback Devices’

2) Right click the ‘Sound’ window and make sure ‘Show Disabled Devices’ is ticked.

3) Right click the ‘Speakers’ entry in the list of devices, should have ‘Realtek High Definition  Audio’ and also show green tick as default playback device.

4) Select ‘Disable’

5) Right click it again and then enable.

6) If sound is still not working unplug your speakers from the audio out socket of your computer and then plug back in again.

7) You should have sound. Your done.

You will probably need to restart the media player or restart the browser, whatever your using, before audio will work for those programs.

[update] To solve this completely change your desktop power settings to prevent the system going to sleep at all. [/update]

BaDboD

6 thoughts on “Windows 8 and Realtek HD audio ‘No sound after sleep’ problem – no reboot fix.”

  1. Thanks for the tip but it dosent work for me, i have to restart every time… fow now i just disabled the sleep option.

    1. It was such a nuisance just going through those steps to get it working every day that I just disabled the sleep option too. I have not had a problem since.

      This has reminded me though. I changed mainboard recently and this one is VIA audio on a AMD chipset board. So ill need to re-enable the sleep option and see if it has the same problems.

  2. The problem still persists and it’s unacceptable in this age of technology. I’ve disabled the sleep function. It looks like Microsoft and Realtak are just going to ignore the problem and hope people forget about it.

  3. This procedure resolved my problem. Thank you.

    For the record, I have a 2015 Dell XPS 13 ultrabook running Windows 8.1 and I see the following in Device Manager:

    Intel Smart Sound Technology (Intel SST)
    Realtek HW Audio Codec

    In my case, my issue does not happen after my computer wakes up every time, but when I can’t be bothered to close all of my applications and shutdown or reboot properly. In these times I can go a month or more with many applications and files open, high memory consumption (75%+), and multiple sleep wake cycles per day. After this period of time, with this amount of abuse, the audio will give out.

  4. A swing and a miss. Still no sound. For a while I was able to fix it by disabling and enabling the device in Device Manager. Then Device Manager started demanding a reboot to enable it again, but I was able to do it through NirSoft’s DevManView. But now even that doesn’t work.

    This is utterly unacceptable on a laptop. Realtek needs to get their stuff together and release a driver that isn’t horribly broken.

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