Dolby Digital Live on Sagers ever? Anyone try modded drivers?

Anyone think Sager will ever talk Clevo into paying the few more bucks for licensing to enable all the features on the sound cards like dolby digital live on any of the upcoming laptops?

I find it sad that a high end gaming laptop requires one to use an external sound card for any quality and do also accept that integrated won't always be the best but doesn't need to be in most cases.

The funny part is most people say onboard sound cards are crappy and while in some cases this may be true, more often vs. not the issue is tweaking and software. A lot of times those USB/external cards "sound" better because the fancy software they are using or they are just tuned better from the factory and need less work.

A lot of times with proper tweaking you can get some on-board ones to sound just as good. Esp. when spec wise they are not that far apart when you compare actual data sheets, it's often they just are not tuned from the factory as well.

Anyway, that said has anyone ever used those reaktek mod drivers? They enable DTS, EAX and better dolby digital but I am unsure if they do the dolby live on the ALC892 chipset and really don't want to mess with myself without knowing ahead of time if will or wont. My optical headset requires Dolby for SS only and won't work with DTS otherwise I would just do and use whichever works. For those unaware some info can be found at: Gamespirit: Realtek mod@X-FI but other users have modded drivers that include different features. Some of the better ones are on the forums that are in china but even with translation you can't get some without an account. That said you can't download the drivers at that site as the links are bad but i listed more for informational.

Most audio chipsets these days support all features and are just disabled for ones they didn't want to pay the license for which is how some of these mods get around that by telling the driver they are an approved one.

Anyway I like to have a gaming laptop for the small foot print, heat generation, lower power and the option to travel with if need be. I hate having to plug a million things into it, esp. since we can't have a docking station which i wish would become a standard for all laptops someday. That is one thing I like on some of the business dell and hp laptops.

 

Sorry, but I think that no amount of drivers will save you from Clevo's cheap & noisy DAC and analog circuit.

USB cards don't "appear" to sound better, they do actually sound better. Because even a mid-range USB DAC gives heaps better SNR than whatever Clevo concocted there, on the motherboard unshielded right next to noisy CPU&GPU circuits.

 

I remember trying this on mine but it didn't unlock any extra features at all. Either I did something wrong or at least the p150hm chip is pretty locked featurewise.

 

Guess I still have to disagree on some parts. While some times on-board is indeed worse I still say not always. As for the noisy part, this is relevant but also keep in mind these USB ones have no type of shielding themselves. USB itself is a fairly noisy circuitry and using a bus that is shared with other things forces a slight delay in audio meaning it wont be as instant as on-board though the avg person probably could never notice it.

That said, my laptop has an ALC892 which if I recall the DAC has an 95dB SNR. If you go on amazon for example and look at Amazon.com: Creative Labs USB Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 Audio System SB1090: Electronics scroll down a bit and look at the compare. One USB has 96 and the other 100. That isn't a super big swing, especially for the mid range 96 one... Now yes you can go to say better also exist but the same can be said for on-board. Look at the ALC889 which is often used on on-board. It has an DAC 108dB SNR. That blows most if not all of the USB ones out of the water.

This is a very subjective topic. While yes hardware can play a big role software can play just as big of one. Heck, look at our sagers with and without the THX software even. That helps some and nothing special is in the hardware for that. It's all based on how things are tweaked and tuned. That in addition to good hardware gives the super sound but I would settle for at least decent software given most these on-board chipsets support the exact same features.

Anyway, I still hope someday Clevo wakes up. While an external may be better they could still give us better internal. I have been very happy with the quality of my sound. No noise or any issues. My only issue now is new headset that does DD but only works in movies not games because the whole encoding crap and needing dolby digital live. On a high end laptop as these are I think that should be a feature.

Oh well, guess I am done with my rant. Just hate spending 150 on a nice headset to turn around and need to spend another 50 on a USB sound card which forces me to have yet another device plugged in.

 

The SNR of DAC is pointless if they don't even supply decent filtered power for it (instead of powering it from same power rail as all other hardware on the mainboard).
All that Clevo did is sourced some hi-band tiny speakers from Onkyo, so they could put a logo on the palmrest and say "see! it has high brand speakers inside now so it must be good!". Obviously it didn't really help the resonance of the plastic case and such.
I don't see what software you can use. Regardless of what it will try to do to the sound, you will get all this noise, distortion & crosstalk added to it after.
Internal audio *could* be made really well, I had a Thinkpad W701 and it was utterly brilliant here - sound board as separate board, removed as far from mainboard as case allowed. Essentially it was a separate mini-soundcard built in inside laptop case. No wonder it did output a brilliant sound. But Clevo seem not to see big need to putting effort to audio hardware design.