So today I started encountering a very weird audio issue: When I play music, it sounds normal in the beginning, but then after about a second the sound gets distorted, as if it is muffled, or as if it is undergoing severe lossy compression. If I stop and resume the music, it goes through the same.
Normally I would know what to do in this situation, but as the years pass Microsoft keeps changing Windows, in the direction of making them dumber and dumber, so in Windows 10 I cannot find the old sound options dialog that I used to use to fix this problem.
Looking around the interwebz for a solution was not easy, so I decided to document the solution that I found. If you are a power user, you can skim through the text and only look at the words in bold-italics.
- Type Win+R and type mmsys.cpl. This will bring up the good old sound options, which Microsoft recently made inaccessible by any means other than this magical incantation, because obviously, nobody should ever want to fix any sound problems, because obviously, Windows has no sound problems.
- In the Playback tab, locate your Speakers. If you are playing music at that moment, they are easy to locate from the live volume meter right next to them.
- Select Properties on your speakers. (Not Configure, but Properties.) This should open a Speakers Properties dialog.
- On the Speaker Properties dialog, select the Advanced tab.
- Near the bottom of the Advanced tab there is an Enable Fucked Up Sound checkbox, which is actually labelled Enable Enhancements. (Euphemism has always been Microsoft's forte.)
- Uncheck that checkbox; you are done.
Afterword
I probably started experiencing this problem right after pairing a new bluetooth sound device. Apparently when Windows detects a new sound device it sets some things up for it, and while doing that it entirely arbitrarily also goes and resets some settings for existing devices, e.g. it enables this "Enhancements" setting for my existing speakers.
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