[yepimonfire]

I recently purchased a new laptop. HP Beats Envy. Now I didn't purchase it because of the beats audio, I purchased it because it was $599, had a touch screen, lighted keyboard, 8gb of ram, quad core AMD A8 cpu, and a Radeon GFX card good enough for light duty gaming. Basically it had everything I wanted and the price was right. Didn't want to get stuck with Intel HD mobile graphics this time around but didn't have the funds for a high end gaming computer. On to the Beats audio horror story though.
 
This thing claims to have a built in subwoofer, but looking at the laptop carefully i have yet to even find the thing let alone hear it. It sounds like a regular old laptop with SLIGHTLY better sound, but there's absolutely no way this thing is hitting below 200hz. Yesterday I plugged my etymotic HF5's into it and noticed it sound extremely compressed, so much so that the i could hear the volume of instruments changing when music went from just a few things going on to full band blazing away. The music also sounded weird and out of focus, hard to describe it really. To try and remedy the problem, i went into the beats audio setting and shut it off. Surprise surprise all the bass disappears and I'm left with thin sounding music and the compression and limiting didn't go away. Basically this thing is fooling you into thinking the Beats audio is great by ruining the sound even more when you shut it off. The actual soundcard in the laptop is a generic realtek HD card, which in my experience other than being a bit noisy with highly sensitive headphones sound mostly okay even with output impedance sensitive headphones like the ety's. I have done all sorts of things trying to rid the computer of the beats audio with no success. There's no way to uninstall it and even editing the registry was futile. Thankfully i have an E17 which bypasses the whole thing and upon plugging it into my home theater rig the computer switches to an audio device contained in the GFX card, also bypassing it. It just irritates me because instead of actually coming up with a creative solution to make laptop audio sound better, they just included some trickery to make you believe the computer would sound much worse without beats. As much as I prefer to avoid their products, Bose has been doing this for years. Making small speakers sound much better than they should, main difference is they actually do sound good for such small speakers.

My dad has one of these and I've actually tested it and been able to get 70hz out of it despite 2.5" drivers. Beats audio is just a dishonest company IMO.

 

[NA Blur]

Perhaps try this:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iulg7hnFD-M

 

[yepimonfire]

It sounds like **** no matter what you do lol.

 

[obobskivich]

IIRC this was documented a time or two before - when the Beats application (afaik its just a custom driver middleware that runs on the Realtek codec; various other companies have done this for years with Realtek and C-Media parts) is "disabled" it does apply an EQ filter that does nasty things. Very evil imho. Kind of a shame that it ruins things even when it's "working" too - wouldn't at all be surprised if it is just applying an overly aggressive compressor (because loud sells) based on what you've described there. I'd say go with the TrueAudio DSP in the AMD setup, or find some USB thing (and it sounds like you've done both). If you can disable the Realtek codec in the BIOS and remote the Beats software that may also be useful in "lightening" things a bit.

 

[yepimonfire]

Unfortunately the AMD audio card only works for HDMI out. I will say though, the beats audio does solve a lot of laptop speakers problems, I just wish it was disableable for headphones. Even my $20 sony's sound good without any dsp crap. It sounds like a compressor and some sort of srs style DSP. There's controls for space, center and focus, which on the laptop speakers does increase those things quite noticabely, but it just sounds all wrong on headphones, and either way, they're still tiny laptop speakers. You can polish a turd but in the end it's still a turd, seems like that's what they're trying to do here.

 

[obobskivich]

Yeah the AMD DSP is only integrated to the display adapter, and can only output digital from itself. There are monitors and TVs and such that will translate that to an analog signal (or separate it into an S/PDIF signal at least) that you could use though.

 

[yepimonfire]

Yeah the AMD DSP is only integrated to the display adapter, and can only output digital from itself. There are monitors and TVs and such that will translate that to an analog signal (or separate it into an S/PDIF signal at least) that you could use though.

A Fiio E17 is much smaller than a TV lol. I don't generally use DSP's unless it's to upmix stereo to surround or surround emulators on 2 channel HT systems, I'm a purist who likes flat audio that hasn't been mucked with.

 

[obobskivich]

A Fiio E17 is much smaller than a TV lol. I don't generally use DSP's unless it's to upmix stereo to surround or surround emulators on 2 channel HT systems, I'm a purist who likes flat audio that hasn't been mucked with.

DSP = Digital Signal Processor. It's a chip that decodes/handles your audio to get it out of the PC (or whatever digital source). The Fiio has one too - it's a USB audio controller that then outputs either S/PDIF or analog. In the case of TrueAudio (AMD's DSP SIP block) it can actually do h/w audio processing for supported applications, e.g. HRTF 3D surround for games, similar to what some Creative, Aureal, and VIA cards can do. Not many modern applications support h/w mixed audio though, due to changes in Windows audio from Vista forward, as well as changes in how many games are made.

However in the wide-world of audiophilia people have taken to using the term "DSP" to refer to "sound effects" kind of stuff, like Razer Surround, DTS NeoC, etc. There's a big difference between the two though - there's nothing at all wrong with DSPs; they're an important part of the digital multimedia ecosystem. However there are many software packages that they can run, like NeoC, that may do sonically undesirable things depending on the listener and the equipment in question.