Envy 14 Speakers Completely Inadequate?

I recently bought an Envy 14 and find that the Beat Audio is in my opinion complete . This leads me to believe I must be doing something wrong?

My problems are:

1. It isn't loud enough!!!! Even with the EQ at +10 all around (except 31hz) it isn't loud. My girlfriends MBP is louder... Maybe I am spoiled coming from a DV6000? That thing was loud....

2. The speakers are super beamy... sitting with the computer on your lap cuts the volume... putting anything in between your ears and the front of the laptop knocks like 6-9db off right away. Maybe this can't be fixed?

3. The line/headphone out is very loud, at 15% or so it will drive my studio headphones at club DJ levels. Maybe this is because I have sensitive headphones, but I haven't had this happen on any other source... did HP design the laptop to drive iPod headphones?

I don't get why the audio sucks so bad on this laptop considering my DV6000SE sounded great and got loud as hell. This is a real bummer. Sometimes watching megavideo with the gain turned up all the way at every step in the signal it is still hardly loud enough to enjoy in a quiet room. Please help!! Does anyone else have these problems?

 

See page 1 of the owner's thread under guides. You'll find an audio output tweak link posted by JJB.

 

Except that he says he has already tweaked the EQ settings...

But yes, this is currently the #1 reason I think I might return the envy 15 2nd gen I recently received... Let me know what you decide.

The thing is... it's highly variable; for games it's fantastic because all games produce their audio on the fly, allowing the speakers to do a good job, but if I play a lower quality DVD (or older movie) I have trouble making out basic dialogue. 80% of the reason I picked this specific laptop was as a multimedia center to watch movies with my girlfriend (in bed, so no it can't be "fixed" by an external speaker system, and I shouldn't have to anyway on a $1200 laptop, especially when cheaper dell studio 1558's will do the job just fine).

 

I did the tweak before posting. It is still ridiculously quiet. I am talking like two order of magnitudes more quiet than the DV6000, maybe more. I wonder if maybe someone will come up with an economic replacement speaker that is more sensitive. If it isn't too hard to open up and access that area I might check it out myself. It was pretty disturbing that I could hear a decent amount of distortion pushing the EQ past +10dB because it wasn't loud, if this is related to the signal chain clipping then maybe that can be changed through programing - if this is the internal amplifier being maxed out, that can only be changed by switching out the amplifier or the speakers.

I was just hoping others were thinking about this or trying to write snippets of code to fix it as its one of the more frustrating things with this otherwise great laptop... the horrid jumping (click and drag............) touchpad is the other let down.

 

Wow, I thought the speakers were supposed to better than most laptops.

 

While I believe the speakers are supposed to be good I think their beats system was made for when using audio out. It produces significant sound quality when using audio out. That is what I have come to find using my Envy 14. =P

 

Yeah, I think beats was meant to use with headphones.
The sounds from the audio out is more amazing than I thought.

 

I dunno. Maybe it makes not so great headphones sound great, but in my studio headphones it just makes it loud as hell. Over 25% on the Win7 volume bar is almost unbearably loud. I bought this computer to work on music on the fly, I thought that meant at least speakers loud enough to hear a conversation in a movie. The crazy loud lineout I guess I can just turn the headphone volume down, I can totally live with that. I realize the laptop isn't targeted at only people with fancy shmancy headphones, but avg. joe does want to hear a megavideo (or DVD) movie I assume - and in my case the lyrics in a song over my friend watching TV at a normal volume.

 

Well my right speaker is muffled and sounds horrible whenever anything is played so I'm not looking to make it louder I'm just looking to not have my envy sound so awful.

 

Its broken... send it in for a repair...