No headphones on DVD or CD

XP-Home, Ser. Pac. 3, Media Player 9.9
After a hardisk crash and reinstall I now find that the headphone jacks on both my Asus DVD and Lighton CD Burner are dead. The sound through the speakers is fine but nothing through the headphones. The headphones work fine plugged into my TV, so they are not the problem. Realtek AC97 is installed. Any ideas, they worked fine before the reinstall. TIA
Dennis

 

Have you tried re-installing the Realtek file? Have you tried connecting direct to the PC's sound card (built in or otherwise)?

It does sound odd that the headphones don't work whilst the speakers do, but it may well be that the card is configured to something that doesn't work with the headphones...

 

I plugged the headphones directly into to speaker outlet on the back of the computer and they worked fine, except that the volume, at its highest setting still wasn' above medium. I also just updated the drivers to the latest Realtek version and still no earphones from the drive devices. PS - I don't have a separate sound card, it is built into the Gigabyte motherboard. I did not use the Gigabyte motherboard CD, or the g-force 4 video card CD, for the reinstall and just let XP-Home supply the drivers. Same for the Asus DVD player.
Dennis

 

Might be worth trying to put in the DVD player drivers then. Just a question - what sort of speaker setup do you have? A 2.0 setup would work perfectly with the headphones, but a mono setup may be the cause of the issue.

 

I've got a two desktop speaker stero configuration checked. I've just installed the DVD drivers and software off the Asus-DVD that came with the drive, but no cheer. Still no life at the headphone jack on the front of the DVD drive.

 

Did you say that the speakers worked in the DVD drive? If not, it may be that the port is indeed dead (though that would be strange for both drives' ports to die at the same time), or that you have a motherboard problem. Are the drives PATA (IDE) or SATA? Have you tried different cables, and different ports on the motherboard?

 

I have had the exact same situation and could never work out why, but now almost all new optical drives do not have the headphone output socket on the front anymore.
I have one Pioneer and two ASUS drives but non have headphone jacks.
You find that on most newer speaker systems the headphone jacks are there.