Bad sound in Windows Media Player

[Grant]

I've had this problem for a couple months now. All sound in WMP sounds like its
coming out of blown speakers, with lots of static, and the bass drownding out
the vocals. It sounds horrible. It happens with all audio and video formats
(MP3, WMA. MPEG, AVI, WMV, ASF, etc). The same files play fine with Winamp and
other media players I have installed, so the problem is not the files, my
soundcard, or speakers.

So far I have tried:
- checking equalizer is turned off
- making sure SRS Wow and quiet mode are off
- maked sure environment/EQ settings for my sound card are turned off
- reinstalled WMP
- checked for soundcard driver updates (there were none)
- ran windows update
- googled plenty for the problem but found no solutions so far

Does anyone have any suggestions on what else I can try to fix the sound in WMP?

 

[dev]

/Grant/ said:

I've had this problem for a couple months now. All sound in WMP sounds like its
coming out of blown speakers, with lots of static, and the bass drownding out
the vocals. It sounds horrible. It happens with all audio and video formats
(MP3, WMA. MPEG, AVI, WMV, ASF, etc). The same files play fine with Winamp and
other media players I have installed, so the problem is not the files, my
soundcard, or speakers.

So far I have tried:
- checking equalizer is turned off
- making sure SRS Wow and quiet mode are off
- maked sure environment/EQ settings for my sound card are turned off
- reinstalled WMP
- checked for soundcard driver updates (there were none)
- ran windows update
- googled plenty for the problem but found no solutions so far

Does anyone have any suggestions on what else I can try to fix the sound in WMP?

Check here...
http://WWW.NWLINK.COM/~zachd/pss/pss.html

 

[Grant]

/Grant/ said:
WMP?

Check here...
http://WWW.NWLINK.COM/~zachd/pss/pss.html

--
For most XP answers and tweaks...
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_abc.htm
http://dougknox.com http://aumha.org
http://support.microsoft.com

Thanks for the tip. Unregistering and renaming l3codecx.ax seems to have fixed
the problem.

 

[Grant]

Thanks for the tip. Unregistering and renaming l3codecx.ax seems to have fixed
the problem.

Update: that seems to fix it for MP3 files, but other filetypes still sound
distorted. Is there any codec management program that will help me see all the
codecs installed and remove some of them until I find out which ones cause this?
I assume the problem is with other codecs. control panel --> sound and audio
devices only lists some of them.