Sound randomly cutting out

[Thelyron]

1) I hope this is the right place to ask my question. 2) I apologize if this is a "stupid" question that i could have easily googled, but i find myself unable to condense it down to a google friendly search term, partially because i'm not that knowledgeable on computers.

Since yesterday evening, i'm having trouble with mc pc's sound output. My usual setup consists of a microphone in the front microphone slot, and either my speakers or my headphones in the front headphone slot. Yesterday when using discord, the sound just suddenly cut out. It came back, and i didn't think much of it, until it happened again and i noticed that the game i was playing also went silent. At that point, i had my headphones in the front slot. I then took my headphones out and plugged in my speakers, to rule out a loose contact in my headphones, but the problem persisted. Thinking that maybe the front headphone slot had a loose contact, i decided to plug my speakers into the back audio output. This seemed to have fixed it, but it happened again after a while. I find it kind of hard to believe that both slots developed a loose contact at the same time.

The problem still persists, and the last time it happened, it didn't just kill my output, but my input, too. Neither my speakers nor my microphone worked for about a minute, after which they just started working again for a couple of minutes, followed by several minutes of the sound turning on and off in a 5 second rhythm. All this happens irregularly, sometimes it works for a couple of hours without a problem, and then it happens every couple of minutes.

I tried replugging everything, rebooting my pc, checking for driver updates, even uninstalling my sounddrivers, but nothing helped. I hope someone around here is familiar with this kind of problem. As i'm writing this, my sound is just completely dead.

Edit: the sound symbol in my taskbar never turns off. Just wanted to add that.

[MrPaladinGuy]

If you're using a sound card then remove it then put it back in, and make sure it's screwed into the PCI slot.

Make sure the correct playback device is selected in Windows.