Windows 11 Power Management

[8bit]

Got a set of used Harman Kardon Soundsticks III speakers this week and got them connected to my PC (Win 11, MSI motherboard with onboard Realtek sound chip). Noticed last night that the speakers seem to keep switching themselves off. Quick Google suggests they do this when they detect no signal from the connected device. Further digging reveals that this is likely to be Windows' power manglement feature, powering down the sound chip when it doesn't think it's being used.

The problem there is I can be ten seconds into a youtube video and Windows bins the sound chip so I'd like to disable this "feature". For the life of me though I can't find any way to disable the power management for that device. There's no Power Management tab in the properties for the sound chip in Device Manager and the registry hack to reenable it (adding the CsEnabled key somewhere) did nothing. The Realtek stuff in the registry contains nothing relating to power management. I can't see any way to do it via the Settings panel, original Control Panel or anywhere else in Windows.

Any help gratefully received...

[xeny]

Have you got another set of speakers or another computer to confirm the issue is the PC and not the speakers?

I've see behaviour where speakers power down when idle and take a few seconds to return to operation when a machine started playing audio, but that was a speaker side thing rather than a motherboard audio chip issue. If it is the onboard audio, basic USB DACs are cheap.....

[8bit]

xeny said:

Have you got another set of speakers or another computer to confirm the issue is the PC and not the speakers?

I've see behaviour where speakers power down when idle and take a few seconds to return to operation when a machine started playing audio, but that was a speaker side thing rather than a motherboard audio chip issue. If it is the onboard audio, basic USB DACs are cheap.....

I think it's a combination of the two. The previous speakers (HK Soundsticks II) didn't do this when connected to the same PC. Assuming it was the sound chip I did some digging online this evening and found a suggestion to ditch the MSI-supplied Realtek driver and let Windows install the native Windows driver instead. Did this and find that now the speakers do still switch off but not nearly as quickly and not whilst actually playing audio. Not so far, anyway...