Altec Lansing Surround Sound Speakers Dying

I've searched and searched all over and I can't find anything about this, the speakers are in great condition, while they're several years old they have been taken care of in mint condition all the time, recently the noise has literally cut in half or less, I"ve never had to put my speaker volume up to 50% or higher and now I can't hear a single thing unless i put it up to full blast, I've checked *all* windows controls, all software controls for my drivers, even updated the drivers, switched from XP to vista which all have different drivers and it's the same no matter what the volume seems to freak out on me and very very seldomly the volume goes right back to normal, which is pretty much ear shattering at 100% volume, so I've been stuck using my headphones to be able to hear anything without the risk of needing to change pants or having a heart attack. Does anybody know what I could do to fix it? I'm unable to find out what's wrong and new speakers are impossible right now which really is dampening my video game enthusiasm and enjoyment. If it helps any I hardly ever have my subwoofer on 100% just because the bass gets pretty loud, and I've yet to see if the fuse for the subwoofer is the problem but it really seems like it wouldn't cause the present problem, all connections are secure, I've redone them time and time again and checked them all to make sure nothing is bare or broken in any way. This coupled with my recent outage of net and then going at 32kbps speed instead of the supposed 8mbps, anyways I'd really like any insight on this, I'm really interested in getting somebody to help me, and thanks in advance for any help.

Very weird problem. One thing you should do is plug the 3.5 mm jack into a MP3 Player or other device to make sure its not the source of the sound. Well if your able to use headphones then it should mean theres nothing wrong with your PC audio output. I'm afraid the problem would lie somewhere between your 3.5mm audio cable to the amp and output speakers.

But yeah the reason to plug the speakers into another audio source that you know works is to eliminate the possiblity that the source is causing the problem. If its showing the same problem pluged into another source then its your speaker system. Good luck

Yeah I don't have an mp3 player or anything sadly to plug into it as far as I know, I have a wide array of ports int he back of my computer for speakers, but mine only use the green and black ports, and i'm sure they're working just fine, it's very confusing and incredibly frustrating to know the speakers i spent a lot of money on are going with hardly any wear and tear on them, and being kept in as good of condition as possible from start to finish, I've no clue what else to do, does anybody know of any good speaker systems for the computer that are good quality? I guess i'll have to start looking for new parts.

Edit: Fuse change didn't work, was nothing wrong with the older one tried swapping in the new one anyways and there's no change, no nicks in cable that i can see, i'mjust totally perplexed by this.

This post has been edited by reith: Dec 7 2007, 02:18 AM