What are the best practices for maintaining audio drivers on a Windows 10 PC?

With some drivers I highly recommend considering the real need for updating them. In my experience, if the driver also comes with a large number of additional applications, then a more frequent update cycle may be necessary – not so much for the driver itself, but keeping the additional applications safe and secure. However, when it comes to just low-level drivers, like audio drivers, you should be considering if there really does need to be updates performed. If everything is working as expected on the current version, and no security issue has been identified with the program, why risk causing possible issues with new code.

Regularly updating audio drivers can help to maintain the audio quality of your computer system. Using the right earphone on the audio jack can equally enhance performance. Using the right windows driver to drive the audio after formatting will help to maintain the audio quality.

Be careful with online support sites, especially ones offering those “free driver update” tools. Most of these are mass marketing efforts to try to get you to install their product, and get ad generators on your system, or worse. This is not to say that you cannot find some good, and reliable, resources online outside of Microsoft or the hardware vendor. Just make sure you are comfortable with the resource, and if possible, verify the solutions and recommendations they make with multiple resources. If you are unsure, then do wait for an official response from a qualified support team.

Something to consider when updating audio drivers is the priority of devices. When setting up a system for the first time, the internal speakers are generally given the first (lowest) priority. If you then plug in external speakers, they get the second priority, and then if you add headphones, they get the third. This is how Windows keeps track of which output you mostly likely want to actually hear your sounds from. This process of building the outputs works fine on new builds, but if you are updating/changing drivers in the middle of the life of the PC, then there is no guarantee that they will come back with the same priority and you may end up with odd results, like the external speaker always playing even when use the headphones.