You were correct it was a driver issue. I thought I had looked into all that but I missed one thing. I just fixed it and I'm going to post exactly what I did in case someone somehow has the same issue and stumbles across this on google or something. I noticed when I started Half-Life 2 the game sounded just as muffled and weird, I noticed the game defaulted to a 7.1 speaker setup, and I am just using 2 regular speakers. Changing the setting fixed the sound. Since there was no setting for this in MC I looked elsewhere. I went into the device manager, found realtek driver > right clicked it > update driver > browse computer for driver software > let me pick from a list > select High Definition Audio Device > hit yes and restart when done. Everything works fine now.
penelope
You were correct it was a driver issue. I thought I had looked into all that but I missed one thing. I just fixed it and I'm going to post exactly what I did in case someone somehow has the same issue and stumbles across this on google or something.
I noticed when I started Half-Life 2 the game sounded just as muffled and weird, I noticed the game defaulted to a 7.1 speaker setup, and I am just using 2 regular speakers. Changing the setting fixed the sound.
Since there was no setting for this in MC I looked elsewhere.
I went into the device manager, found realtek driver > right clicked it > update driver > browse computer for driver software > let me pick from a list > select High Definition Audio Device > hit yes and restart when done.
Everything works fine now.