Poor audio quality from 3.5 mm jacks on XPS15

I plugged my headphones into my XPS 15 and was shocked at how bad they sounded, dull with thin plucky bass...no body to the sound, the maxxaudio control panel equalizer and the maxx bass control didn't really help much either. Its certainly not the headphones.

So....I Uninstalled the Dell installed realtek audio drivers (6.0.1.6312) via programs and features in the control panel and downloaded the latest drivers from realtek, R2.66 (6.0.1.6482) dated 2011/10/21. I lost that cheesy "waves maxxaudio" control panel but now my laptop sounds fantastic through the 3.5mm jacks , great bass and full bodied sound just like my iPod. Hope this helps another XPS-15 user who has poor audio quality from the 3.5 mm jacks. By the way, the laptop speakers are not good enough to let you hear the difference as they have no bottom end at all.

 

I had something similar happen to me when I changed the default format to 24 bits, 96000 hz, I restarted my laptop and it's all fine now.

 

i did get that same issue with my nokia headset plugged into xps 15,but that was due to headset instead of headphones.