Wayner, Mark, screw this PC crap...LOL!!! I went for a walk, got a big bag of Skittles plugged my CD player into my tube integrated direct, put on "Close To The Edge"...not too loud but just right and part that sounds like your in the lagoon where they found Yoda in Star Wars, water droplet, spongie synths...OK much better now..
Ok ...I'm not doing a restore/revert because I've never had them work so looking at the "Sound" settings I have a lot and as Wayner said the PC has to be gagging on them....I disabled one and it went away so I got the following (SRS is a sound module/driver I've been using with headphones)
1) Speakers 2 -SRS HD Audio Lab
2) Speakers 2 -SRS iWow PC Ready
3) Speaker/HP Realtek High Definition Audio Ready
4) Speakers USB Audio Default Device (Big Green Checkmark its the default)
The Realtek drivers came with the VAIO Laptop and probably need to stay, I need the USB obviously I just need it to be there and not suddenly disappear. The SRS items have a startup icon group and the uninstall option.
So I use the uninstall option on the SRS and then come back into sound properties and see what might be leftover from that move and just disable any instances I see of SRS stuff left behind.
