Dell’s –speaker=off and Realtek Maxx Audio

I had a couple labs of OptiPlex 3050s that I noticed were not auto-detecting any Speakers or Headsets therefore the audio would be completely disabled. These machines I had gone in to the BIOS and turned off the Internal Speaker (Integrated Audio was still enabled). The Realtek driver was installed but the Maxx Audio shortcut/program weren’t there at all (under C:\Program Files\Waves”). If I tried to manually install the Maxx Audio msi, it just returns the error ‘This software is not supported on the current device’ (I eventually realized running the msi by itself no matter what will just give back that message).

Dell Maxx Audio

I ended up turning the Internal Speaker (–speaker=on) back on, completely uninstalling the Realtek Audio Driver (and removing any left over folders under ‘Program Files’ & ‘Program Files (x86)’ for Audio) and restarting the computer. I then went back on to the machines and manually ran the Realtek setup.exe installation. After another restart the Maxx Audio was now present.