laptop sees external speakers as internal

[dtuchhypercraft]

ive noticed when i connect my external speakers it sees them the same as their internal speakers anyway to seperate this? my laptop has one blown speaker so i turned balance of for the right speaker but this setting now applies to the external speakers
its a thinkpad s540

 

[k1114]

It's not seeing it as external vs internal, you just can't output to 2 different devices at once. The 3.5mm jack is a stereo output, meaning it's going to want left and right channels and any changes you make will of course affect it's right and left. What you want is to separate devices per channel which you can't do as windows doesn't allow outputting to multiple devices. You'll either need to use the external speaker or the internal.