My son has one of these Asus TP512U flipbook laptops.

In the weekend for an early christmas present I got him some Corsar HS25 gaming headphones.  These have a single 3.5mm 4 pole (3 pole?) connector rather than usb.

When he plugs it in the realtek drivers figure out it's a headset over the pair of headphones (which disables the built in laptop microphone).....and here's where the problems start.

The realtek drivers play absolute havoc with the microphone.  There's an echo, or it just doesn't work.  If you set the microphone to "listen to this" it seems to go into a feedback loop of clicks and never actually  plays any sound.  Also under headset mode when I first started trying to resolve it, it'd drop all the bass out, and seemed to remove the center channel.....if I told realtek (via the realtek audio console) that it was a pair of headphone then the sound is fine (of course then then the headset mic is disabled).

I thought it might be the headset, but I have two other laptops here (none using realtek and both with single 3.5mm connections) and the headset works fine.

I even tried plugging in a no-name usb audio card, but that also seemed to be affected.

The only solution so far, it 

I've done the typical, remove the drivers and let them reinstall, I tried downloading a new set of audio drivers from Asus, but that didn't seem to include the software, I removed the realtek audio console, but then I was stuck in headphone mode (finally got that back by reinstalling from Windows Store).  It's just really a mess.

Anyone had similar with Realtek drivers?  I'm not sure how useful Asus are going to be, and not sure if I can go direct to Realtek to try and download drivers.