Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Not unusable, but they are very tinny. It is not helped because the audio driver blocks any low frequencies from going near the speakers. They are actually a pair of tweeters (no more than 1/2" diameter), but Dell forgot to include the woofer.

However, you need to plug in some external speakers or headphones to realise what you are missing.

John

 

it seems that audio just kind of stinks on 14.1" laptops...the 15+" laptops ive seen seem like they have better sound. probably because there is more room, i dunno.

 

Dell laptop size are smaller than other 14inch wide laptops. (well now HP is competing in this...)
So the speakers are small... no mater where they move them on the machine (without being stupid.. like: speakers at the bottom of the laptop or on the palm rest). So i don't blame them, especially that I like Dell size machines.
Also it is a business class machine, technically you tend to not play music in a meeting and stuff, so there is no need to put expensive, 'technological advance' thin speakers.

So yea, they used small low-end speakers which sounds like tweeters, and to top things over the sound card block low frequency sounds from reaching the laptop speakers. But, they are loud.. for laptop speakers compared to many laptop from friends such as Toshiba Satellite and a Acer model, where their max volume are like 50% of these speakers. If you put headphone in, the sound is pretty good. It sounds like any standard integrated motherboard sound card, which is pretty good for a laptop. I mean they could be worse: I had an Intel motherboard once, and the sound output was, with any speakers, making it like if it was Transformers speaking...as cool it was it tend to get annoying when you really want to listen to music.

The sound output of the speakers won't make your hear bleed. They do the job. But if you have speakers or headphone in hand, you'll definitely would want to plug them in. Personally I don't mind, even thus I enjoy music. The rest of the laptop pluses compensate for this downside.

If the sound card was not blocking low frequencies, then I am SURE that it would limit max volume like the other laptops I mentioned... trade off probably. Also, if this was not the case, than probably you could change the speakers yourself with better ones if you have a littler modder in you. I mean you have to remove the palm rest... but... that won't work... (the speakers are so hard to reach, that I don't think Dell will ever notice) as... well.... the sound card block low frequencies. Maybe some driver hacks.... now THAT would be interesting.

 

WHY does it block those frequencies? just curious. i dont really like sounds on my computers much; i always mute it when not having a specific reason to use them.

 

The sound is block because if you put the speakers at max volume and ply some music then they will get damaged, and get over magnetize or demagnetized with result over time sound like... well broken speakers... you know metallic sound, can't lose mid range frequencies, and then eventually stop working. Speakers have each a certain rage. That is why on high end speakers, you have several speakers of different sizes. Very low frequency, low frequency, lower mid range, upper mid-range, high-range and tweeter. More commonly you have: low frequency, mid range and tweeters. Or a speaker that does all of them. The more you separate the frequency between specialized speakers the higher the sound quality (they are many other factors, that is one of them).

 

There's a new NVS160M driver (A05) dated 19th February 09.

John

 

Hot diggidy, getting it now.

How do you find out about these driver updates? Is there an RSS feed for it somewhere?

 

The Question is, Is it better than the latest Geforce drivers from laptopvideo2go?

 

Go to the Dell support site and enter your service tag.

I keep one of my many Firefox tabs set to that site.

John

 

I got the same problem. I solved it by using the 2 prong charger of my old Dell 630. Alternatively you may use a 3 prong to 2 prong adapter.

If you want to know the details, read this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=282720&page=4