None of these tricks helped.I had major issues playing games like World of Warcraft, I would alt- tab and the sound goes all jerky and distorted like a broken robot. It was really bad playing Facebook videos or anything while software could be using sound like games or other videos/ads.Only thing that fixed it was new Realtek drivers but not ones on the Realtek website, the drivers listed at Softpedia.Installed these as the catalog ones and Realteks are dated June 2015.

• Realtek High Definition Audio Enhancements

Softpedia have later version from March 2016.Works fine now. After upgrading Windows 10 Version 1511 Build 10586.3, I noticed a dramatic drop in audio quality. This fixed the issue for me. Open control panel/Sound. On Playback tab, select Speakers/Headphones Realtek High Definition Audio Default Device, then click properties. On General Tab, in the Controller Information groupbox, click properties. From the Realtek High Definition Audio Properties Dialog Box, on the General Tab, select Change Settings.

Select the Driver tab and click Update Driver. I also had very poor sound quality after upgrading my PC to Windows10. Tried to install different Realtek drivers but it didn´t work at all. I found a solution after reading many posts on different forums and it had nothing to do with the driver but with power options. The default setting of Power Options is 'Balanced', changing it to 'High performance' improved immediately the bad sound quality of (Control Panel-Power Options - check High Performance).I hope it will work for many of you as well.

Skitchpatterson3's and bekce's answers helped me get started, but I needed to tweak the steps a little bit. I bought an MSI box which had Realtek HD Audio driver. The first thing I needed to do was update the sound driver in Device Settings.

After that, I opened Realtek HD Audio Manager and navigated to Sound Effects, which wanted to launch Nahimic 2. The Windows 10 Aniversary update broke Nahimic 2.2, so I needed to download 2.3 from their Facebook page. The Mega link looks sketchy, but I scanned it with Norton and it looked safe. After updating Nahimic and restarting my computer, my headphone audio was working perfectly. Overall sound quality and functionality decreased with each major windows version since XP. If sound could be considered quite of good quality in XP, in Vista and 7 it lost a lot of quality due to the multiple OS layers interfering with the actual sound card functionality. Even good tweakers like SRS lost a lot of possibilities.

Realtek High Definition Audio Enhancements

In the newer 8.X and 10 versions, it's even a worse quality (but not that of a big decrease like from XP to Vista/7). But there are way more functionality problems. Issues like auto-volume reduction are still unfixed practically.Generally, sound is harder to tweak assuming it functions relatively correctly initially. Disabling specific things like Dolby, DTS or EAX may partially make things better. Improvisations like disabling all effects will have bad consequences, like lower volume or even undistinguishable audio. In conclusion, in most cases the OS is at fault directly for the major sound issues that are very hard to track/fix. In some cases, the simple windows troubleshooting system may partially fix some of the issues, but don't count on it.