Sound quits on internal speakers / Windows 11 / HP Elitebooks ... speakers are physically fine

[FrankOH]

This is kind of a question and a 'band-aid' fix in case other users are having this issue. It has to do with the audio driver / system in some of our Elitebook computers.

For the past couple months, we've been having issues with the internal realtek sound system cutting out.  No audio output through the internal speakers, although it will work through attached devices. Windows THINKS it's working; audio troubleshooter shows no problems and any 'test' in the sound system of Windows shows a 'playing' animation. But no audio of any type can be heard through the internal speakers.  Attached headphones?  Yes, that works.

Troubleshooter, no fix. Switching audio devices, no fix. Volume up/down/on/off, no fix. Some cases, restarting the computer didn't even help. Until this morning, we had to remove all the audio devices from the Device Manager, let it reinstall them and then restart the computer to get it to work. Finally this morning, tried restarting the Windows Audio Service. That worked!  It restarted the dependent Realtek Audio Service, so next computer with the problem, I'm going to try just that one, but for now, restarting the Windows Audio Service worked.  Still a pain because regular employees don't have the admin rights to do that, but at least we can fix their audio issues in under a minute now.

I wanted to post this in case anyone else was having the same issues ... to let them know restarting the service is a quick fix, but also to see if anyone has an idea of why this is happening to begin with.

We have about a dozen or so computers this has happened on.  Mixes between Win11 21H2 / 22H2 ... all drivers updated through Image Assistant.

Sadly, we switched to HP computers 3 years ago because of the problems we had with Dell for a couple years, but am now looking at switching back to Dell laptops because of all the problems we've encountered with HP laptops over the past 2 years ... this audio issue, wi-fi card issues, usb-c network card issues, etc.