HDMI won't output audio to my TV?

I solved this by uninstalling the audio devices using Device Manager.

  1. Open Device Manager from the Control Panel.
  2. Expand "Sound, video and game controllers".
  3. Right click and uninstall all "High Definition Audio Device" items.
  4. Restart the computer and the devices should auto reinstall.

Another step that i initially tried that didn't appear to work but might be required. In device manager menu View > Show hidden devices. Expand Audio inputs and outputs. Uninstall the items having the problem.


Things to try:

  1. Get a high-quality HDMI cable
  2. When the problem happens, disable and re-enable the ATI HDMI audio
  3. Update Chipset driver and BIOS (if available)
  4. Uninstall both the ATI HDMI Audio and the RealTek High Defintion Audio in the Device Manager (do not check the box to uninstall the drivers) and reboot.

You should try deleting all of your audio output profiles, and either creating a new one, or let it create a new one for you. Also, make sure that your volume is up, and your sound card is on. Make sure that you restart your computer as well.

If this by chance is your TV, try changing the input setting (Ex. HDMI1, COMPONENT). Also, unplug your TV and replug it in.

This very well could be your TV, and not your computer at all. Try connecting some other audio input device into your TV (Ex. VCR) and see if it still doesn't work. If it works, its your computer. If it doesn't, its your TV. HDMI cable disconnection is possible. Check that the HDMI cable is firmly placed in your TV, and that its connector is not broken.

If you receive a picture on the TV from either the computer or something like a VCR, it is probably not the HDMI cable.

Hope one of these methods works.


I'm going to list the various troubleshooting steps I took and what the result was:

  • Restart Computer: No difference
  • Reinstalling my audio drivers (Realtek HD Audio): No difference
  • Tried with and without AMD HDMI Audio Drivers: No difference
  • Update Chipset and BIOS driver: No updates available
  • When the problem occurs try to disable/reenable AMD HDMI Audio Drivers: No difference

Whilst trying to fix this problem I encountered another problem with my video card, outlined in this question.

When I finally fixed that issue, the problem in this question wasn't fixed. But then I upgraded to the beta version of the drivers for my video card and installed using the method I outlined in my answer on that question, and I took my HDMI cabled out of the TV and plugged it back in and that seems to have worked.

So, what I think it is: Upgrading the video card drivers.

Some people suggested upgrading the sound drivers or the chipset drivers or the BIOS, but the HDMI port is on the video card, it uses its own drivers that are included with the video card. That's why I think it finally worked when I updated my video card drivers to the latest beta version. I did that about 4 days ago and haven't experienced another problem since.

Note: It appears that the HDMI sound drivers are completely independent from the normal sound drivers. My Realtek HD Audio Manager has no control over my HDMI connected TV.


I fixed this same issue (although I only had one duplicate HDMI audio device appearing in playback devices) by first selecting the real HDMI audio device in Windows Playback Devices (right click the volume icon in the system tray and choose Playback Devices) as the default audio device.

I chose the HDMI audio device at the top of the list and set it to be the default audio device by right clicking it and choosing the option to do so. If the option is greyed out, it means it's not a real device or nothing is connected (or recognised as being connected) to the port.

In this case, the system had an AMD E-350D APU with Radeon HD 6310 graphics on Windows 8 64-bit and running version 13.9 of the Catalyst driver.

The Catalyst control centre still reported that the device (a Toshiba 42HL833B LCD TV) did not support audio, even though this was evidently not true as the computer audio was currently being output by it. This "cosmetic issue" was fixed by downloading a later version of the Catalyst driver (version 13.12) and when installing it, choosing to do a custom uninstall of the existing drivers prior to installing the newer drivers. In the custom-uninstall options, I selected to uninstall the AMD HDMI Audio driver. After this task completed, the duplicate HDMI audio device was no longer present, yet sound continued to function ok from the real HDMI audio device which was still selected as the default device. The current version of the specific HDMI audio driver in Catalyst version 13.12 is 8.0.0.8814