Surface Pro No audio to external monitor

Anonymous
2013-03-19T01:21:57+00:00

Hello, I am unable to get external audio to my tv from the surface pro using a minidisplay to hdmi cable. I went into the sound options and the only two speaker options are speakers and digital audio (hdmi). The second always says not plugged in. I am connecting through a pioneer receiver to an LG tv. This works fine on my other windows 8 devices. The cable is a generic brand cable that said it has audio capability.

Surface | Surface Pro | Install and update

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Anonymous
2016-11-28T05:44:19+00:00

Actually, I found going into Device Manager and disabling and then re-enabling the "Intel(R) Display Audio" driver solved the problem for me.

  1. Right click on the start button, and select "Device Manager."
  2. Look for "Sound, video, and game controllers," and expand its section.
  3. Right click on "Intel(R) Display Audio," and select "Disable."
  4. Then right click it again, this time selecting "Enable."

This was done on the anniversary update with the latest drivers. You may have to try unplugging and then plugging back in the HDMI cable between steps 3 and 4.

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Anonymous
2013-12-08T21:25:20+00:00

This one was weird, but I was having the same problem about 5 minutes ago.  Try going to  control panel > sound > manage audio devices > click on your tv device and edit properties.  Go to advanced then change the default format around a few times and test.  The first two I tried played no sound.  The third one I tried said that the device was in use by another application and asked if I wanted to stop it.  I clicked yes and now I have sound.

Good Luck!

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Anonymous
2016-05-26T03:14:53+00:00

ok I did what he said here:

I was connecting to my Onkyo receiver Aux input

Went to control panel -> sound. 

Properties

Advanced Tab

Clicked a bunch of different quality levels... nothing seemed to change.

Picked 16bit, 96000 hz.   It said "device in use" I clicked yes.

No sound, BUT I noticed that on my Onkyo the display started changing when I played the test sound...  turned out the test sound was too short, the receiver couldn't "Detect" the right format and switch to it fast enough... I got one tiny "peep" at the very end that clued me in...

So I loaded a video file with a lot of audio, and wham it detected (after about 1-2sec) and now I get audio.

I'm pretty sure I had to do the thing on the advanced tab before it started "working" because I didn't hear any "peeps" before that and I tried on other TV's (directly) and it didn't work, but in this case the delay on switching/auto detecting made the problem even more frustrating to detect (that I had fixed it!) when the test sound was too short!  (maybe that's why some people on this thread said it works on the TV, but not when using a receiver!  Try a long clip of something in the background.)

Thanks!

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-07-24T08:41:53+00:00

    I recently bought a Surface Pro from the Microsoft store along with the official Microsoft HDMI adapter. I can't seem to figure out how to get audio over HDMI though. I am trying to get the Surface Pro to play audio through my Onkyo TX-NR818 receiver. When I connect the Surface Pro to the receiver nothing happens. The receiver says Analog. The Surface Pro only has Speakers and Headphones listed in the Sound properties. Device Manager does have an enabled Intel Display Audio device listed though. I had this problem on a different desktop PC that used a Gigabyte motherboard with UEFI. The solution to fix this on that computer was to go into the motherboard's firmware settings and set the audio driver option to Legacy instead of EFI. The Surface Pro seems to use EFI without a BIOS though so this option isn't available. Is audio over HDMI even supported in EFI mode with AMI's UEFI impementation? They make the UEFI firmware for the Surface Pro and all Gigabyte motherboards that support UEFI. How do I get HDMI audio on the Surface Pro?

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-07-22T02:44:56+00:00

    I'm having the same issue. My Surface Pro is connected to my Samsung plasma TV, and sound plays fine through the TV speakers, but when I switch to external speakers (samsung sound bar + sub), there is no sound. The surface is the only device hooked via HDMI that doesn't play sound through the external speakers for some reason. Really frustrating!

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