Issues with audio

Hi,

I've had issues with the audio on my laptop (Alienware M14x r2) for a while now. It's been getting steadily worse, most notably with volume control and audio jack connection. When I boot my pc from sleep of from being powered off, it will refuse to output sound through the headphone jack anywhere from 30 mins to an hour, on occasion for longer. It will just automatically put sound through the jack only after a period of time, and the times where it takes extremely long, I have to manually select headphones from the soundblaster control panel --because it just happened not to do an automatic switch that time (doing this manually before the ~30 mins doesn't do anything).

With the volume, the higher I put it, I get extreme distortion through the speaker/headphones. If headphones are plugged in, the distortion is extremely noticeable if I put the volume above 3 bars (30 in windows volume control) and it's so bad that I can even hear loud crackling through the built in speakers. In reality, that volume level is not that loud.

This kind of relates to how, often times when I boot my computer from just sleep, the volume level will just refuse to change whether its headphones or speakers. I can change the level in the windows volume control panel, or even with the alienware keyboard fn, but the actual volume just stays at max. I then have to change volume in applications themselves so as not to get blasted.

I put these all in one post because I imagine that they are related but.. oh well. 

I need some serious help with this, thanks.