Well, people that choose to build thier own laptop do it because they have a clue, so I figured out how to take apart the z70va to the motherboard and replace the audio card...and problem solved. So obviously it was a hardware issue, brought about after the card worked for a time. This was my resolution, I will be more than willing to help in the future if someone wants some direction-
Monday February 27, I called ASUS tech support, 25-35 minutes on hold, got a guy that barely spoke english, he told me that this was a known problem with the z70va's speakers and that I should send in the laptop for replacement. I use the computer daily for work, couldn't afford the wait so I asked that he would just ship out the card, which he did, it was recieved today, Friday March 3.
I dissassembled laptop at 3pm and by 7pm my sound was back working and my laptop was reassembled. Totally painless, and if I knew what I was doing the repair would have been 30 minutes. I just had to find a lot of screws, and I had never been that far into a laptop before. I wish I would have had a camera to assist anyone that would rather fix thier own machine than wait for ASUS. Anyways, that is it for me and this thread, but it was do to this thread my laptop is fixed, in just over a week!! Thanks, and PM me if you need someone to talk you through the motherboard level repair yourself!

That's great news phatsew. I'm glad your Z70Va is back up and working the way it's supposed to.

Sorry this came late. I have the ASUS guide on how to completely disassemble the M6VA/Z70VA. It has step by step photos and comes as a PDF file.. so if anyone wants to host it, that would be great for future reference here for other members.

hey, got my laptop back and everything was working fine for 3 days. yes 3 days. booted up this morning and red light is on. Speakers do not turn off with headphones installed. I don't know what to do now. Last time it took 3 weeks . Can't afford to be without it for 3 weeks. Even if I replace again I feel like its only a matter of time before it breaks again.

I went the same route as phatsew, through Asus, doing the replacement myself. It was a better customer service experience than I expected. The disassembly requires patience and attention to detail, and might not be for everyone. I do have a copy of the full disassembly pdf, if anyone needs it.

Hi everyone!!! wow I couldn't find the sound driver from the Asus North American site for the Z70VA so I take it they pulled it. I'm guessing here but I am thinking looking at the posts that the driver it's self is physically damaging the optical/headphone jack. Phatsew you should NEVER install ANY drivers until you get the ACPI software installed and working. This is a very important thing and I’m shocked the others helping you that crank out tons of notebooks didn’t make this very important point. ACPI and Intel chipset inf first ALWAYS! I also notice people calling it a strange light, it's not strange it's the SP/DIF out using TOS/link and that's an optical audio bus. What happens with any soundcard jack sensing technology that uses wire as in copper bus is it detects LOAD on the plug and that causes it to switch a software state IE to headphone and turn off speakers. What I do know is for example when mother board venders implement say an ALC850 the various board makers will wire different plugs to the ALC850's I/O and this is vender/board specific. The sound chip ODMs generally have an SDK/API that the board makers use to customize the drivers for their particular sound I/O implementation. What I am guess here is asus configured the driver improperly that leads to damaged jack sensing circuitry due to software issue in the driver. Believe me it's possible to damage hardware with software specially in this case. Now that we know the jack "senses" based on load on the plug we have to understand that headphones very greatly in their impedance and some headphone that have a lot of load could damage the jack sensing circuitry also. Another thing to note is the optical miniplug would not have any wire/copper to created load on the plug for it to jack sense. So I would assume the implementation of the jacksensing would be a combination of a mechanical switch for it to know if it's an optical plug and load sensing for the copper headphone connection. Either way the plug has both mechanical and circuitry to change it's state. From reading here I'm certain it's hardware damage caused by incorrectly configured audio driver and the API/SDK level when asus customized the driver for their implementation. To bring this point home you guys could have noticed that the nVidia NF2 chipset drivers ,of some time ago, right on the download page at nVidia made specific points that the audio driver that’s apart of the chipset drivers has problems with certain boards, specifically they state Chaintech 7NJS isn’t to use audio driver in this package. Hey it uses the right AC’97 ALC850 encoder right! It’s the I/O implementation of it. You ask hey how does the reference driver from realtek work then? Well they do include profiles for specific popular and common hardware I/O implementation that the reference vender driver will work with. Look at the inf file with the driver package with a text editor and you will see it including specific driver settings/reg keys to work with each implementation. They use the hardware ID strings the card/device have on SPD/EPROM on the device to reference the hardware to specific install direction for specific implementation of sound chip. pci\ven_1095&dev_3112&subsys_61121095 is an example for my SiL3112 Looking and reading around here I really believe as a community an ISO for each model notebook with a datestamp on it should be created for each notebook also including directions on installing the device drivers and the sequence to install them. I will have this soon with the help of all you others and have no problem hosting the files as the up/down on my hosting is unlimited.


Justin

I ran into a peculiar problem recently on my Z70va. Plugging in headphones no longer automatically disables the laptop speakers. So when playing music or any other type of sound, it comes out of BOTH the speakers AND the headphones. I've tried updating the drivers. No luck there. I've tried swapping with a pair of headphones that I know function correctly. I've tried manually disabling the laptop speakers through volume control, doesn't do anything. I mean, my next step would be reinstalling the drivers or resetting up the OS. However, I would imagine though, that it wouldn't be something that the operating system does but rather something that is hardware related? Unsure about that, maybe someone else can confirm. I thought I'd ask around here before I ring up ASUS support.

*edit* ah, didn't realize this thread existed, thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I'll go contact my reseller.

merged into Z70va speaker problem thread.

It's the audio card needs to be repalce, nothing to do with OS and you can test it by use Audio DJ without boot to OS.

My laptop speakers have gone out...again. This isn't the first time. Whenever they go out, the only sound that comes out of them are muffled staticky noises.

Anyone know why this is happening?

Try connect external speakers to see if it does the samething, if it does then probably the sound card, if it works on external speakers then the laptop speakers is bad.

Connecting to external speakers or headphones results in no noise as well. Also, my sound goes out at random times; sometimes it's not available at startup, but maybe 20 minutes later it will be.

when it's not working go to device manager and check to see if sound card is present, more likely it's a sound card problem. Have you also check the CPU temprature? sometimes it also cause the same problem when CPU is overheat.

I've checked the device manager when the sound wasn't working and it looked OK, no yellow exclamation mark. Usually my CPU temperature is around 60C; is that too hot?

60*C is normal, I think you might need to replace the sound card.