Audio playback through headphones and speakers

Anonymous

Headphones or speakers in windows 7, Can't have both?

Looked over the other questions, nothing seemed close.

My machine was dual boot, XP and Vista ultimate, now XP and Windows 7. In both XP and Vista I could have the speakers and the headphones plugged in together, both playerd noise, and I could use one or the other by plugging them into the front and back audio jacks.

This enables me to play games during day with speakers, and then at night with head phones, and no reaching round under my desk to remove cables.

Now I am using windows 7 and amongst the many other problems I have with it, I can't play with speakers or headphone until I have gone through a silly lot of clicking to disable one or choose the other as default. Why has this been changed in windows 7 after Vista, it seems an utterly pointless logic. I can turn my speakers off with the power button and get the headphones working. Now I am either or. So my brand new IR head phones are wasted. Please someone tell me there is a work around?

It's little meddling silliness like this that make me want to remain in XP.

Much thanks in anticipation someone has figured a work around.

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous

I've got both my Jabra GN9350 and my laptop speakers playing audio at the same time. :)

Here's the trick (and it's been verified on 3 other Win 7 systems):

R click on your speaker icon, select 'Recording Devices' (if you have the sounds dialog up, it's the 2nd tab 'Recording')
R click in the white space, be sure that BOTH "show disabled devices" AND "show disconnected devices" are checked.
**Now this step is going to take a little bit of thought for each computer being used: on my laptop (HP Elitebook) I get a device "Stereo Mix", ENABLE this device.
Click on Properties, go to the tab 'Listen'
Check the box "Listen to this device", also change the drop-down box below "Playback through this device" to be your second audio device

-- To verify that you've done this correctly, go back to the Sound dialog tab Playback, you should now see both of your audio devices showing the little green graphs moving.

Here are the specific settings that I have on my laptop, maybe this will help with your settings:

Speakers- GN9350 (Default Communications Device)

Speakers- SoundMAX Integrated Digital HD Audio (Default Device)

Stereo Mix- 'Listen' feature points this device to my GN9350 headset.

Paul

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Anonymous

Right. Your hardware has not found a driver that works in Win 7. You will have to keep checking for updates for that to use the device in Win 7 the way you want it.

Rating posts helps other usersMark L. Ferguson MS-MVP

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64 additional answers

Anonymous

2015-06-19T21:45:51+00:00

+1 to you... You rock man! I have been trying to figure out my problem for **months**. I have been uninstalling/installing sound drivers, nothing was working.

I have a Razer Kraken headset, and whenever I tried to play music through my speakers (keeping speakers + headset enabled at same time) I was getting mysterious/vague errors like this:

Windows Media player "Device was disconnected" error

WinAmp "failed to write to sound buffer"

I went into the devices your way (r click on speaker icon, and r. click in the white space making sure to show disabled and disconnected devices). The 'default headphones' device was flickering (it was saying "not working" and appearing/disappearing -- FLICKERING in my audio devices list - I've never seen it do this before) I disabled the default headphones... something in windows (AudioShell?) crashed the first time I tried to disable it, but 2nd time I was able to disable the default headset and BOOM! everything is now working the way it's supposed to.

I am running Windows 7 64 bit and I am extremely happy my sound is finally working properly again!
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Anonymous

2015-10-14T03:54:37+00:00

hooray, simple problem, simple solution. but I never would of figured it out on my own!! thanks
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Anonymous

2016-04-30T07:56:02+00:00

What if i don't get headphone option under "Playback device" list. Check marks are on both disconnected & disabled. But only speaker is shown under Playback devise list. My speaker get good output but when I connect my headphone, nothing I can hear but can see the msg "you just plugged a device in audio jack" I have downloaded sound driver from Panasonic website. I have uninstalled and re-installed Realtek HD Audio Manager. Did **** of a lot of researches and tries but all in vain. Please help me. I have Panasonic CF-53 Toughbook laptop.
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