Sager 8760 Subwoofer issues

Hello,

I just got my Sager 8760. Everything is great, except for the tinny, bassless speakers. This laptop was supposed to come with a subwoofer. I contacted Sager Support, and they told me I had to download a special 5.1 driver from their site. I did that. Now, when I got to the realtek control panel, I have it in 5.1 mode with center unchecked. I can click on the subwoofer, and I hear it play. But in games and music, no sub action. Only the two front speakers play.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

Let me know what you find, I didn't even realize it had a sub. lol

 

i do believe it has one.

 

Yeah, it is advertised as having 4 speakers and a sub. I wish that a laptop in this range would have a bit better speakers. The realtekHD sound card is descent, but the speakers are ehhh. I wish I could take the 2.1 speakers from my Dell Studio XPS 16.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/5616191-post754.html

To add to my previous post, the W870CU's audio controller uses a primitive method of simulating surround sound. The two side speakers have a short 20-30ms delay from the two front speakers and the amp to create this. Also, the side speakers are running midrange cut to further "enhance" the surround sound experience.

I'm using the older 2.47 set from Realtek, but I'm pretty sure the newer revisions do not address any of the surround sound issues. I just keep my driver in stereo output since I'm a simple guy.

 

Hmm. There is definitely some sort of speaker on the bottom, as I can hear it when I click the subwoofer on the Realtek HD control panel. I don't get any sound from it in any other program. I just expect it to give it a bit of mid range/mid-bass. I obviously don't expect any thump.

I could care less about their "rear" speakers that add extra surround. I just want a little more umph than just what the keyboard speakers provide. I don't beleive my expectations are too high. I'm not comparing the laptop speakers to headphones or real speakers. I am comparing them to other laptops. Granted, I was spoiled by the Dell Studio XPS 16's surprisingly good 2.1 setup. Granted, there was no deep bass, but I never expected that. Just descent sound.

On the positive side, there isn't enough bass at all to rattle the laptop as the Dell sometime did. But the sub not doing anything is something that should be fixable.

 

The best you can do right now is adjust the gain levels for each individual speaker under "room correction." I forgot to add that both the center and the sub channels are driven through that single amp underneath your notebook. So enable both your center and sub if you want maximum volume from that driver and crank up the gain for both center and sub. You can also turn up the side speakers and leave the front speakers, but then the sound stage sounds so unnatural.

 

Thank you for the idea of using room correction! I messed around with it a bit, cranking the sub and center all the way, even turning down the fronts. It has confirmed my superstition. I am getting no sound out of the amp/sub underneath. The only time I ever hear anything from it is by click on the sub or center speaker in the realtek panel. It plays it's test noise, but while listening to music, movies, games, etc., I get nothing from that sub underneath.

Same with the rears, but I don't care to much about that. I'm with you, I'm not a big fan of artificial surround sound. But any extra midbass I can get from the speaker underneath would help.

Any ideas how to make it work with other sound other than Realtek's control panel tests?

Thanks.
James

 

Update:

I tried drivers from realtek's site, same story.

For fun, I hooked up my Sennheiser headphones to the laptop, then the desktop I built. I couldn't beleive the difference.

With stock settings, the Via sound chipset on my desktop had so much more and so much nicer bass. Cleaner, deeper, and significantly louder. Overall Sound quality is more of a toss up, I'd have to do more testing. But I am very impressed with Via's sound chip versus realtek. For years, I have believed realtek was the way to go for integrated audio. Maybe in early 2000s that was the case, but not now. I hope once I get my Klipsch Promedia 2.1s fixed, they still sound fine on the realtek laptop. I'm sure they will. They sounded best with the X-Fi card I had years ago.

Anyways, a bit off topic. Back on topic. I have searched the net high and low, and everyone is saying either the sound sucks on this laptop, or they know the sub isn't working. In both cases, I believe the only speakers really doing anything are the 2 stereo keyboard speakers. With some settings, I can get the "rear" speakers working, but they sound terrible. I don't know if this is a realtek issue or what, but it is very disappointing on a laptop like this. Good thing it kicks () in every other category.

I recently became a Sager reseller, but I will now warn people not to expect much from the built in speakers. It's so hard to find the perfect gaming laptop. Sager is coming close, but poor internal speakers and mediocre sound cards on a gaming laptop? Come on.

 

I have a couple of comments here. The audio quality is not just a function of the realtek chip, there is also the audio amps and the speakers, in this regard the audio amp implementation is very basic in the 8690/8760. There is no bass emphasis added or any other kind of analog tricks to upgrade the sound. Also the speakers which are the most important to the quality of sound are not very good. The second comment is the realtek only outputs what it’s told to from its digital input, in other words if you are listening to something that only has 2 channels of sound, you will only hear sound out of the front two speakers. If you take a DVD movie that has 5.1 sound you will get sound out of all the speakers. There is no processing going on to make sound come out of all speakers regardless of the source.

You find that a lot of laptops have SRS sound as a selling point, this can be implemented as an analog processor that is placed between the realtek or via (or whatever DAC is used) and the audio amp. The other way is through a DSP processor (through software). Either one is used to enhance the sound quality you hear. The DSP implementation can be used with the Sager using a program called SRS sandbox that can be downloaded at SRS labs, also search the sager forum there is a dedicated post that I started on that subject.

 

Definitely. Audio quality is a result of every thing in the process, from the file, to the player, to the sound card, to the DAC, to the amp, to the speakers, and anything else in the mix. The 8760 definitely has worse speakers than a $1500-3000 laptop should. Granted, most will use it with headphones or external speakers for music, movies, games, etc. But almost everyone uses the internal speakers sometimes.

I downloaded the trial of SRS Sandbox, and it seems to have the ability to tweak the sound to sound better than it actually does.

My Dell Studio XPS 16's IDT audio driver had SRS control built in as well, which I had tweaked. The difficulty was switching them from when I was using the internal speakers vs headphones vs external speakers. The SRS Sandbox seems to allow you to change that more.

However, the SRS sandbox still is not utilizing the subwoofer. Now, I know Soviet has said that there is an amplifier underneath, but as I said earlier, I definitely here a bassy sound effect come from underneath when testing in the realtek driver. However, the SRS isn't utilizing it either, even with the Realtek driver in 5.1 mode. Even DVD movies aren't using it.

My main disappointment was that I expected a subwoofer similar to what my dell had. An actual subwoofer that was always on. Even with mediocre speakers, a sub, equalization, and SRS can compensate. Polishing a turd comes to mind.

When I get home tonight, I will install my amp back into my Klipsch Promedias, and hopefully use that most of the time. They obviously are much better than the built in speakers! I just feel like I was promised a sub on my laptop, but didn't get one.