I just ran updates on my computer last night and got an odd and annoying surprise this morning.

Why does all my audio sound like crap?

Before the update everything sounded great, full and booming.

Now everything sounds small and compressed,

What the hell?

Has this ever happened to anyone else?

I should also add that I played a 7" on my record player and it sounds fine, so I think that discredits it being something with my stereo system.

I have the same 7" as a CD single so I used the same song for comparison. The other day the difference was very nil; now there's a huge gap.

Sounds like Windows Update installed a driver update to your sound device. You can uninstall it or try rolling it back. If all else fails, try going to the manufacturer site and look for an older version.

Yep. Open up WIndows update and check what it installed on 9/26. If it installed anything audio related you can just uninstall, reboot, then tell windows update to ignore that update to keep it from trying to reinstall it the next scheduled run.

If he's on Windows 10, get ready to open CMD and manually uninstall the KB.

I got to the core of this and got my sound back to where it was. Thanks for the suggestions.

I don't really have audiophile level equipment but I really liked where my audio set up was before the update and it just sounded horrible afterwards that it was driving me crazy.

The sound coming out of my speakers before sounded so full and then it just sounded so forcibly compressed afterwards that it was awful.

So, what was the problem in the end?

Personally I thought a sound driver was just corrupted, but then I mentioned this to my friend and he said quite a few people were having this issue with the update so I guess it wasn't an isolated event.