Sound on new D630 sucks

I just bought a D630 (with the 135M, but I don't think it matters in this case).

The sound sucks. It's kind of subtle, but it sounds a little garbled and low quality.

Is there anything I can do besides buy a new sound card? There aren't too many options in the sound setting in the control panel.

Advice/help appreciated

 

You should be more specific. Is it the speaker or the sound card that sucks? If you have had consumer targeted notebooks in the past, then you might be used to better speakers. On business level notebooks, the speakers are usually not very good. I have a ThinkPad T42 and I just got a D630 for my wife( just delivered yesterday ). The speaker on her D630 is much better than that on my T42 and her old ThinkPad R32. It sounds pretty good for a business class notebook. If you wanted a rich multimedia experience, you probably should have looked at an Inspiron or XPS system.

Do you have the 9-cell battery? I think that might cover up the slits to the speaker. They designed the case such that the whole left palm-rest acts as a speaker, but that tends to muffle some higher frequencies.

If you can tell that the actual sound quality( even before it hits the speaker ) is bad, then your only option is using an external soundcard with external speakers. External sound cards can be as big as a hard-drive or as small as a USB dongle, but I am pretty sure the internal speaker is hard-wired to the internal sound.

Post some more specifics about your complaints if you want help or advice.

EDIT: I guess another question to ask is; does it sound bad using external speakers/headphones or are you complaints about using just the internal speaker?

 

Are you talking about sound through the speakers or headphones? Even the cheap sound cards these days can normally produce decent sound, so maybe it is just cheap speakers?

 

D630 has only one speaker, have you tried with headphones or external speakers ? Maybe it's just the speaker that is bad. The audio chip in the D630 is a Sigmatel 92XX and it's the same one in the just released Inspiron's (at least in the 1420)

 

I think this topic was discussed before, and the sound quality improved greatly for me when I used a decent headphone. Plus, D630 is not really a multi-media notebook so I wasn’t expecting much anyway.

 

Yeah I should have clarified.

I'm using the headphones I've used in awhile. They do not sound this bad on my iPod.

If it's been posted before (and resolved) can you give me a link...? I can't find it if I search "D630 sound"

Some more clarifications:

Sounds weird when I play music in iTunes. I originally thought it might be iTunes, but I tried playing it in windows media player and it was just as bad. If I had to describe it, I'd say it sounds like someone turned the base waay up on ****ty speaker, there's that garble effect. I checked the equalizer, messed with that, no result.

IMO it's the sound card. Something about it sucks.

Oh and - does anyone know if the D630 has an easy-to-access slot for a new sound card? Like this one?

 

That's just a PCMCIA card... you have a PCMCIA slot on the laptop... don't you?

 

Do I? Is that the thin one... or the other... thin one.

Lost.

 

Wait, try this first:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=2060621&postcount=3

 

I didn't see an 'enhancements tab', but will try when I get home.

 

Just thought I'd say: I installed some drivers for the sigma tell audio from a CD that came with the laptop, went into the control panel and turned off all the enhancements; now it works!

Thanks.

 

Cool. It's tkinda lame though they don't set it up in a way that sounds good out of the box.