Asus Xonar D1 looses sound on one of the channels

Question

I've bought an Asus Xonar D1 sound card a year ago. Since then I've been enjoying the sound quality and being plagued by it's bugs. Some were solved by switching to 3rd-party drivers, but one bug persisted:

I'm using the card in 2 channel mode (stereo). Sometimes after PC boots up one of the channels would be silent. Rarely that would also happen mid-work, one channel would suddenly become mute. So the sound would be playing only through the other channel. Changing sound properties (volume, balance) or soundcard drivers features (DG and such) would not help.

The bug persisted with official and 3rd-party drivers. Jacks and sound-system are not to blame (swapping all of those those did not help). Which lead me to believe that's a hardware problem (see the answer).

Answer 1

The problem seems to be caused by faulty hardware relays on the card. They do click on and off when the card gets initialized and sometimes contact seems to be not made or to break off.

Slow remedy:

1. Reboot PC. This way whole card gets reinitialized (re-clicking all its relays) and starts to work properly.

Quicker remedy:

1. Open "Device Manager" -> "Sound, Video and Game Controllers" -> "ASUS Xonar DX Audio Device" -> "Disable Device". Windows may ask you to reboot if you had sounds played in the last 15sec or so - if it does, say "No" and try again in 10sec or so. (something to do with cache cleanup?).
2. Now re-enable device again. You will hear said relays clicking and sound will return to all channels.