removing vocals from videos I've been watching.

It was absolutely bizarre. I'm watching football and I continue hearing the crowd and other noises, but the commentators were either lowered in volume or even completely removed. I think something similar happened last night when I was watching The Dark Knight. I guess this might be something it does to avoid echoes when in video calls? (obviously not THIS, but I imagine it's related--it's just doing it to the wrong audio stream)

The only way I could fix it was to disable the realtek hd audio service. So that means no equalizer (which I don't care about). Hopefully no other side effects.