Windows 10 has been getting more stringent with things like security and driver signing which will disable drivers and even stop installation drivers opting to install Microsoft’s own generic drivers that don’t include the audio manager. The R2.82 driver is still absolutely fine, however because it isn’t updated often by Realtek, Windows during an upgrade process with remove the driver.
Realtek’s own support for the drivers has very little updates, in fact drivers for the Realtek audio drivers and audio manager haven’t been updated since July 2017, leaving us with version R2.82 in 2020. The Audio manager gives control of many extra settings that are not in Windows 10 such as speaker configurations, Sound effects and Virtual Surround settings. Realtek’s onboard sound card device drivers include an Audio Manager that is packaged with the installation of the Codec.
After version updates/service packs within Microsoft Windows 11/10 versions or even major upgrade from Windows 7 or Windows 8 there has been a plague of issues related to Realtek sound device chipsets being removed during the process, even though the drivers for these earlier Operating Systems is the same, they get removed sometimes.
