me

Guess who has to ask family tomorrow if they can download updated drivers, using their computer, onto a usb and transfer it that way

also me

I just had to switch from a x399 motherboard to a B550 model, both by ASRock, both “Taichi”. It’s a long story as to why my hands were tied, but anyway, I did it without reinstalling Windows, and it worked fine! (I don’t think it’s an important detail as far as this story is concerned, but you never know.)

There are two features that I want with my desktop audio:

Disabled jack detection: plugging in a front headphone jack does not disable rear speaker output. There are no separate audio devices in Windows, which is the most important thing to me. A lot of apps still don’t handle playback devices being changed in the middle of execution.

Loudness equalization: does exactly what it says on the tin. Very important to me for a few reasons. Because it works on a per-stream basis, it greatly enhances voice chat in games, for friends who are still too quiet even on 200% boost. If a video somewhere is too quiet, well now it’s not. And it means that I can keep my headset volume lower overall, which is healthy. (Especially as someone who suffers from non-hearing-loss-related tinnitus.)

The problem is, with the default Windows drivers, I could have #2, but not #1, because the Realtek Audio Console UWP app wouldn’t work. (You can only find this app through a link, not the Win10 store itself, for some goddamned reason!)

And with my motherboard’s drivers, I had #1, but not #2!

Now, I can’t say this with 100% certainty, but it seems like the reason is that ASRock has made their Realtek driver integrated with some Gamer™ Audio™ third-party thing called Nahimic. And in doing so, they disabled the stock enhancements, Loudness Equalization included. 

But don’t bother trying to download the “generic” drivers through Realtek’s own website: they’re from 2017, and as far as I understand it, they’re not the new DCH-style drivers, they’re the old kind. DCH is a new driver system with Windows 10 that decouples a driver and its control panel, so that either can be installed & updated separately. (This is actually a pretty great thing, especially for laptops in general, but especially laptop graphics.)

So where could I find drivers without any kind of third-party crap?

The solution was, for me, this unofficial package:

https://github.com/pal1000/Realtek-UAD-generic

It uses other sources (like the Microsoft catalog) to fetch the actual latest universal drivers. However, I had to go download this one other tool, “Driver Store Explorer”, to force-delete a couple of things that were causing the setup script to loop.

Anyway, now I have both #1 and #2, I’m happy, but also pretty annoyed that I had to go resort to this kind of solution just to get the basic enhancements & effects working. Don’t fix what isn’t broken...

If this ever breaks I’ll probably just stick with #2 only and buy a jack splitter to fix the lack of #1. Ugh.