How to easily fix your Realtek audio driver in Windows 11

Shaun
Jan 2, 2023
Tutorials, Windows 11 News
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6

If you’ve ever messed around with sound settings on your Windows 11 PC, you’ll likely have seen the words Realtek audio driver pop up in a context menu. Now, drivers are incredibly important because of what they do. Essentially, a driver is a piece of software that lets your Windows 11 OS communicate effectively with the various bits of hardware you have installed and/or connected to your PC. Therefore, if your Realtek audio driver is faulty, your Realtek onboard audio system won’t work. 

The article below will explore how to effectively and easily repair your Realtek audio drivers on Windows 11

What’s wrong with your Windows 11 Realtek driver?

There are numerous reasons why your Realtek audio driver may be faulty. However, most of these can be narrowed down to four main causes:

  • Your audio driver is outdated
  • You have incompatible audio enhancements connected to your PC
  • Your audio settings are faulty
  • There’s a conflict between your audio driver and your Windows 11 OS

Luckily, because there are numerous reasons why your Realtek audio driver may not be working, there are also numerous methods you can use to repair them. We’ll cover those methods in detail below. 

How to fix Realtek audio drivers on Windows 11

Method 1: Update your Realtek drivers

How to repair Realtek audio drivers on Windows 11

The first thing you should verify is that your drivers are up to date. If your drivers are out of date, they can cause havoc with your sound card. If you check who manufactured your PC’s sound card, you can head to their website and update your drivers from there. You can also update your audio drivers automatically. Here’s how: 

Head to the search bar on your taskbar and search for Device Manager. 

In the Device Manager, find and click on Audio input and outputs. 

Next, you need to hit Speakers and then, click Update Driver. 

From here, hit Search automatically for updated driver software.

Method 2: Uninstall and reinstall the audio drivers

How to repair Realtek audio drivers on Windows 11 02

Sometimes, simply updating the drivers isn’t going to be enough. However, in these situations, you can uninstall and reinstall the drivers from scratch. Here’s how:

First, right-click on your Start menu and head to Device Manager. 

Next, hit on Sound, video, and game controllers. 

Right-click where you see Realtek High Definition Audio. 

Now, scroll down to Uninstall device, and place a checkmark next to Delete the driver software for this device. 

Next, click on Uninstall. 

Now you’ll need to install the audio drivers again. For this, you’ll need to go to the official Realtek audio website and download a new driver. 

Once the download starts, you’ll see the file in your browser’s downloads. 

All you need to do is click on the file and it’ll start the installation. Finish the installation by following the on-screen prompts. 

Audio restored

Most things that go wrong with your PC are fixable. Audio driver issues are no different. As you can see, it’s relatively easy to repair and restore the functionality of your Realtek audio drivers. And, if all else fails, simply reset your Windows 11 device.

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Comments

  1. Jek Porkins said on January 3, 2023 at 10:00 am
    Reply

    I’ve always been under the impression that using Device Manager for anything else than seeing if there are unidentified devices or devices without drivers, it’s practically useless.

    If a driver is acting up, I just uninstall it, I prefer using Wise Program Uninstaller, because it also cleans remains, there are other alternatives too – Revo, Geek, IOBit and others, but I prefer Wise for myself.

    And then I just download the official driver and install it.

    But since maybe Windows 8 or 10, I haven’t had the need to install anything other than a graphics driver. Since I have nVidia, the GeForce Experience program has become a nuisance and requires an account just to be able to update your drivers so for that reason I download my driver manually, then extract it so I can delete the NvTelemetry and install it from the setup.exe inside what used to be the driver installer .exe.

    I haven’t had problem with Realtek in years, last I can remember was with some laptops or old computers where I didn’t install the correct drivers or one laptop from 2008-2009 that was built for Vista/7 and I wanted to run XP on it and it was hard to find proper drivers.

    Now Windows 10 and 11 may be junk, but at least they don’t need basic drivers like audio or internet anymore so it’s less of a hassle.

  2. Rick said on January 3, 2023 at 3:41 am
    Reply

    Couple problems:
    -You’re showing the “Audio inputs and outputs” section when you mean “Sound, video and game controllers”
    -But regardless, “Update driver” as of a couple years ago stopped checking for updates in Windows Update anyway. Now it’s only good for local updates.

    What they can do, however, is run Windows Update and then look in Optional Updates for any available drivers. It’s not uncommon to see updates for major things like this there.

  3. yanta said on January 3, 2023 at 12:27 am
    Reply

    Easy way to avoid audio driver issues; Don’t use UAD drivers. Don’t use Windows 11.
    Problems solved.

  4. riri0 said on January 2, 2023 at 8:41 pm
    Reply

    Fail article. Who are these random people that are not listed in the staff list but write useless articles.

    You talk about Sound, video, and game controllers, but your screenshots show something else entirely. Are you sure these new writers aren’t actually poorly trained AIs?

  5. r00t3d f0r h3r pl3asur3 said on January 2, 2023 at 7:25 pm
    Reply

    Next Up On Ghacks:

    How to press the spacebar key in Windows 11

  6. WorknMan said on January 2, 2023 at 7:02 pm
    Reply

    The realtek driver on my machine thinks the line-in port is a microphone. Pretty sure I have the latest driver installed.

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