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Summary: How to set up and control your computer's audio system in Windows; learn more about audio for computers in this free instructional video.
Views: 885 | Tags: audio, installation, computers, speakers, repairs, laptops, computer audio, computer speakers, sound systems
About the Expert
Tony Ramirez Electronics and media guru Tony Ramirez is known among his friends, family, and clients as "Inspector Gadget." His love for new technologies aids in his abili... read more
Hi, my name is Tony Ramirez from Tampa, Florida, and on behalf of Expert Village, this is Audio for Your PC. Ok, so you have your fancy speakers, everything is plugged up, whether it's surround sound or regular stereo. Now, how do you set everything up? Well, in Windows, one of the first things you want to do is you go ahead and go to your Control Panel and you'll click your Sounds. Once you're in your Sounds menu - let's see, what do we want to do here? We want to adjust our audio settings, so we'll go ahead and click Audio. I'll drag that over here. And then right here on the bottom, it says "Speaker Settings" So this is one of the main things that you want to do if you don't have anything that's considered normal, your conventional stereo speakers. Go ahead and click Advanced. In this drop-down box, you can actually choose whatever you have, whether it's no speakers at all, of course, stereo headphones, desktop speakers, laptop speakers, whatever. This will actually equalize and calibrate the power and everything else that's needed to provide sound to all these speakers. So I have a 5.1 system, so I'll go ahead and click that, and that's what this little drawing is right here. You have our center speaker, our front speakers, our subwoofer, and our rear speakers. So you can actually go ahead and if you have a good enough - of course - processor and card, you can put all your hardware accelerating on "full," your sample rate on "full," on "best." Everything's good, everything's set up, you go ahead and click ok and everything's ready. So now you can go ahead and adjust your volumes, set up any other sounds that you want. You can go ahead and play around with these. You really can't mess anything up too bad. If you do, you can go ahead and click Restore Defaults, and everything will be set back up. But that's the main thing you want to do is set everything up right in your computer, so then when you actually start using your software, things will be recognized right away. You'll know if you have a Surround Sound system or if you have just a regular stereo system. That's the basics of setting up the PC audio in actual Windows.