Some sound cards have strange audio effects that you can set, and that's probably what is going on. Media player classic home cinema is open source so files used inside. Every user have their own choice where many users were using WMP as default and some of them have VLC as favorite. If you hear any difference at all, then there's probably something wierd going on with one of your drivers. MPC HC is similar to media player classic, 321 media player and K-lite codec packs but this one is one of lightest from them. Or simply close MPC and reopen it.) This changes the output device. Changing these settings while playing a video will have no effect. ( Close the file that is playing before testing. Switch it to Default WaveOut Device and try playing the video. At the bottom is a dropdown labeled DirectShow Audio. Go into the options and into the Output settings page. But there's one more thing to test while we are in Media Player Classic. Then it's time to look into driver issues. If you see anything else, that's probably your problem. For a WMV/WMA file, you should see WMVideo Decoder DMO and WMAudio Decoder DMO. This leaves 2 other filters responsible for actually processing the video and Audio codecs. There will usually be 1 source filter (seen as the file name), 1 Audio Output filter (usually Default Direct Sound Device), 1 Video Output filter (usually something like Video Renderer or VMR9 or Overlay Mixer). While the video is playing, right-click on the video, and click on the 'Filters' submenu. Uncheck WMV1/2/3 in the Transform Filters side. What I usually do is using Media Player Classic, go into the options. It's possible that you've downloaded and installed some other codec which has hijacked WMA from MS's codec, and that might not be fun to debug. You should be able to play the file just fine using only Windows Media Player and Microsoft pre-installed windows codecs.

Mpc hc windows xp sp2