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Update 2/8/07: In a new post “SigmaTel and PC Manufacturers” I’ve linked to the 3 biggest manufacturers that have Vista drivers for the SigmaTel audio codecs.

Update: 1/12/07: I found that I had to uninstall the current drivers, reboot and then install the downloaded driver for a clean install.

I’ve gotten a lot of hits on both parts 1 & 2 of this topic. I’ve also gotten some good comments and some people that are having real problems with the SigmaTel drivers. I have not experienced the headphone problem after reinstalling the drivers with Windows Update. On the other hand I’ve had a lot of people comment with their solutions. So, to put them all in one place I’m adding them here in this blog, instead of the comments area.

1. For an Intel motherboard goto the Intel site and under the download section select your motherboard. For my Intel mobo (different to yours) the latest Sigmatel driver is dated 8/8/2006

2. Had hella probs with audio tried the update through windows tried re installing old drivers and nothing worked almost gave up then i tried unistalling my audio drivers then reinstalling after restart and Ive got sound out of my headphones cant believe it! Uninstall your audio drivers start from scratch then reinstall old drivers from resource cd or dell site.

3. I installed Vista on a dell D600 laptop and also couldn’t get sound via my headphones. The problem was nothing to do with drivers – by default the ‘headphones’ level was muted for the audio device! Go to ‘Sound’ in the control panel and then click on ‘properties’ for the sound device (’SigmaTel C-Major Audio’ in my case). Click on the ‘levels’ tab and scroll down to ‘headphones’. click on the little speaker icon to un-mute headphones!

4. I’ve got this sorted on the Inspiron 6000 now – I’ve installed the Realtek AC’97 XP drivers (for my Sigmatel C-Major) and that has fixed it, although it took 3 attempts to get through the install process.

5.

a. Right click on the speaker icon, select Playback Devices.
b. Click Speakers one time (should say something like SigmaTel Audio CODEC Working).
c. Click on properties, go to Levels tab.
d. Click on Input Monitor.

Your input is enabled, then just go to Recording tab and select as default the input you’re going to use (line in, microphone, rear mic) This should resolve the issue, it’s the same in XP only the Input monitor is a lot harder to find in Vista! They did a great job hinding it aparantly, don’t you miss the days of being able to just hit properties? Anyway, took me 1/2 hour to find this, and then it was an accident. I was getting volume (run my HD DVR sound through the sound card and the DVI cable through the monitor) according to the Recording properties just no sound coming out. Be aware, I found my first BSOD shortly after getting the sound to install

Hope this takes care of your mic issues and also helps others who may have had the same driver install issues I came across Dimension E521: 160gb SATA HD, 16x DVD+-RW, 1024MB DDR2, SigmaTel High Definition 7.1= Surround, NVIDIA 7300 LE 256MB, INTEX PC TV Capture, Vista RC1

Thanks to David, Kirk, Alex, Graeme & Michael for these helpful solutions.

Technorati tags: Windows, Vista, Microsoft, Windows Vista