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I bought a new computer equipped with an integrated Intel® High Definition Audio sound card , im using Windows 7 and the volume is set on its max, im also using the same speakers i used on my old computer and i noticed that the volume is much lower now.
its acceptable when using speakers because i can switch it to a higher volume but its more problematic when using headphones !!!
is the problem coming from the Intel® High Definition Audio sound card and is there any solution?

Thanks!

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One component of any normal sound card is the headphone amplifier, and just as you can buy a 70 watt stereo or a 700 watt stereo, different amplifiers vary in how much power they can output.

It's likely that your old sound card simply had a more powerful headphone amplifier than your new Intel HD Audio card. In order to boost this, you need to either get find another audio interface (either external USB/Firewire or internal PCI card) with a higher output, or run the output from your Intel card to an additional headphone amplifier of some sort.

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I understand, so the problem comes from the intel HD audio, i used many computers with different soundcards and this one is really the worse :( Thanks for the answer NReilingh – mcha Sep 5 '10 at 4:18
It's the same card integrated into all of the Mac logic boards nowadays. It's good in that it's feature-rich, can do optical digital out and 5.1 channels, but whenever I use my monitoring headphones I hear this weird sort of digital "residue" after most sounds... Of course, for pro applications, Apple really expects the user to use their own hardware for this stuff (or at least the optical digital out on the sound card). I've taken to using a Behringer UCA200 interface into a Mackie 402-VLZ3 as my headphone amp. – NReilingh Sep 5 '10 at 12:14
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