yepimonfire
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Dec 6, 2010
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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.
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.