When I purchased my new computer a few months back I also made two other purchases alongside - Altec Lansing Speakers (to provide great audio playback) and an EMU 0404 Soundcard/Digital Audio System so I could get high recording quality.

The speakers came with the Realtek HD Audio Manager system - and the default audio device "Realtek HD Audio output". This all worked fine. The EMU 0404 Soundcard, however, uses its own device, called "E-DSP Wave [EF00]". The problem is, I need to use "E-DSP Wave [EF00]" for recording purposes, but although the programmes are registering the output of sound it is not coming out of the speakers. Realtek HD Audio Manager only lets you select "Realtek HD Audio output" as the output, which I think is the root of the problem, because I can't send the sound through "E-DSP Wave [EF00]" to the speakers.

How can I get round this?

I know this problem is quite particular to the devices, if there is a better place on the web to ask about this then feel free to tell me.

The EMU is a seperate soundcard, and the realtek is also a different sound card as recognised by windows. When a program starts, say iTunes, it'll load the drivers for whatever sound card you have selected at the moment (control panel>Sounds and Multimedia Devices). If you change cards through the S&MD control pannel then you need to quit and reload the program.

Easiest way is to ditch realtek and just use EMU as your soundcard for both recording and playback (face it, its better than onboard, unless some programs have trouble running the EMU) and plug your altec through it or get a small 4 channel mixer (behringer if you want something cheap, or theres other brands that are much better quality), plug your speakers through the mixers main stereo outs and plug in your pc sound card (realtec) on one of the channels and the output from your EMU to another channel.. and dont forget to set aux sends to the EMU if you wish to record from the mixer too..

I guess that as I want to use the Realtek for general use and EMU for recording I can switch the two over whenever I want to use one or the other.

This should be fine, I need to order an extra cable now, if it doesn't work I'll probably be back here again!

No worries.. Have fun