The Realtek HD Audio manager comes with pretty much every computer and is a pretty handy tool for configuring or setting up audio devices such as mics, speakers, headphones and whatnot. 

However, the latest release of the said driver, v2.82, seems to be having an issue that’s causing it to go missing on Windows 10 installation. This seemingly random bug has popped up for users on Windows 10 version 1903 or above and as you can guess, is pretty annoying.

This article, we’re going to talk about how you can fix this issue should it happen to bother you. 

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Fixing missing Realtek HD audio driver in Windows 10

First up, we’re going to have to remove the faulty driver from your computer. Once that’s done, we can either try reinstalling the new version straight from Realtek’s website or try an older version.

If you’re on a laptop, you can download the drivers from your manufacturer’s website, and that should fix any issues. Here’s how to proceed.

Step 1: Press the Windows Key + X and click on Device Manager.

Step 2: Scroll down to find Sound, video and game controllers. Double click to see all available devices.

Step 3: Find Realtek High Definition Audio in there. Right-click it to open the context menu. 

Step 4: Click on Uninstall device. This will remove the device and its drivers from your machine. 

Now that we’ve removed the device and its drivers, it’s time to get the new drivers installed. You can either search for the old version of this driver, v2.81 on the internet.

The older driver isn’t available on Realtek’s website. You can search the internet for downloads, and you’ll find many of them but be sure of what you’re downloading. We found a safe link over at FileHippo that you can try out for the v2.81 driver.

You can download it here

Otherwise, you can simply head to the Realtek website and download the official v2.82 driver. 

Once you’ve downloaded the desired driver, install it just like you would with any other piece of software by executing the setup file. Let it do its thing.

When you’re done, navigate to C:\Program Files\Realtek\Audio\HDA. You’ll see a file named RAVCpl64.exe. This is the executable file for the Realtek HD Audio manager. 

You can double click the file to run the manager. If you want, you can also make a shortcut to it for quick access.

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