Soundcard on the NP9150?

I have heard lots of complaints about the soundcard on the Sager NP9150. This is really important to me since I use some pretty decent logitech 2.1 speakers connected to my laptop at all times.

Can any owners confirm/deny this?


And also, what are the fan sounds like?

 

on board speakers are not the best in the world but i have a 5.1 plugged into the 3 jack sockets and it gives brill sound. most of the time i only have the green plugged into the headphone socket and the sounds is perfect especially in game.

 

In my experience, the sound card is pretty bad. There is a lot of noise present while gaming with decent headphones. I ended up getting a $20 USB soundcard which rectified the problem.

 

Should this soundcard work?

Newegg.com - ASUS Xonar U3 16-bit 48KHz USB Interface Sound Card

 

I've got it and it works great :thumbsup:. I use it both for gaming and listening to music.

 

Hutsady here on the forums also has used that card and reported it does great.

 

Yikes! For a $20 USB replacement to outclass it makes me wonder if it was faulty, or if there is a common defect.

 

Yup, with headphones the sound quality on 150em and 170em is pretty terrible. Though, when compared to my P8P67 pro, the U3 still clearly beats the onboard audio (so it would be a good purchase even if the sound quality was decent).

 

Yep I purchased it as well, excellent card, a pleasure every day. The onboard audio really (really) sucks on the P1xxEM.

The fan noise is more than acceptable for me, especially if you can keep the notebook cool, but the bios does not perfectly handle temperature variations.

 

Could it be a driver issue? Did you try reloading it? And is it strictly when outputting through the aux port, or is the noise issue also prevalent in the speakers?

 

Its not the drivers. The integrated speakers are nothing great, but not worse than one should expect from a laptop.

 

Yeah, This has been confirmed a few times by our customers. Sound quality is acceptable to some and others not at all. I personally would be fine with the sound on it, but when I'm using the onboard sound, I'm usually using speakers and not expecting it to sound great. If I were to get this kind of sound out of my desktop I'd immediately buy a new card.

Different people have different tolerances of acceptability.

 

Ah, and I haven't heard of it being a repeated issue, so this would make sense. I wondered if the problem was subjected to the 3.5mm jack exclusively or not. It's Realtek audio if I remember correctly, yes? I've had minor issues with drivers with them in the past, which is why I asked about the driver.

 

I've read of at least two notebook forum users report that they solved that noise problem by setting the PC Beep to 0. Did you notice it in anything besides games? From reports it would occur in games that engaged the discrete/dedicated GPU, and didn't occur if/when things were using the integrated (Intel) GPU. I don't know why the PC Beep effected it, nor why it only occurred when the dGPU was active but that is what has been reported.

 

The only problems I've had are when I plug in headphones. The sound goes ultra tinny and seems washed out.

Otherwise with the 2.1 Bose I use at home the sound is decent. Onboard sound sucks but that's all notebooks. If you want quality I'd recommend the USB plugin and a nice set of 5.1 headphones.

edit: Obviously mine is the 9170. I'm pretty sure it's the same card. If it's not, color me orange and call me a liar.

 

That's very interesting. I'll have to have somebody try that the next time we hear of an issue. Thanks for that!

 

Yeah, that seems to be the consensus is the headphone quality since that is pretty isolated to your ear and easier to hear. It's reported on both the 9150 and 9170 but the 9370 seems to have got an upgrade and no complaints so far.

 

Why is it always the way that when I buy a laptop the next one is better? Oh yea technology. Curse you progressive increases in quality and performance!

 

Just think about the next round of laptops and consider how much more awesome they'll be! I thought the current run of Clevo/Sagers were excellent compared to the previous, I can't wait to see what's next.

 

Not all Clevos have bad sound.
W370ET has a different dac than the EM series. By the way - both HM and EM series use the alc892 dac.
the W series have the alc269 dac, which is by far better for music listening than alc892.
Its just stereo capable, but it has more power and punchy sound.

I have both a P150HM and W370ET and Ive compared the audio to one-another. And I came to the conclusion that I dont need a 7.1 channel capable audio card Especially when it lacks in sound quality compared to a stereo one. It also lacks in output power

 

The noise was mainly present during gaming. I've read that the discrete GPU's proximity to the soundcard causes some interference. I don't know if that's accurate, but it's definitely there when gaming and using the GPU.

 

It's not a question of acceptability. It's been theorized in other threads that there is a LPF (low-pass filter) forcibly enabled on the main channel of the sound card.

Then one person measured the frequency response of the audio jack which indeed confirms this theory:



The frequency response should not look anywhere close to that even on a bad setup. That response curve just plainly shows it is not operating as it's supposed to.

The Realtek chip does not produce a frequency response like that unless it has been misconfigured (the LP filter is enabled in software), or someone has made a mistake in hardware and added a LP filter to the motherboard.

So the audio output of the 170em and probably the 150em is just plain broken. It's a bug, there is no doubt about it. The bug is either in the drivers or programming of the Realtek chip, or on the board itself.

What I don't understand is how something like that made it past quality assurance at all. Clevo/Sager is basically selling a laptop that is broken.

 

What I was referring to was the fact that some people have no issue with the sound quality on the laptop and find it more than adequate. I don't think anybody will argue that the sound is superb, but adequate is something that we find the majority of customers agree with. By acceptability, that is again subject to personal preference, as this thread shows there are people who don't think it's an adequate sound experience. Me for example, probably wouldn't mind the sound on the laptop as I'm not going to be expecting much out of it. Others though do expect that quality and why it is generally viewed as sub par audio. I'm not trying to say the problem doesn't exist, and hopefully it's corrected in the next revision, but not everybody finds it to be unacceptable.

 

Ok Derek. Thanks for the clarification. I really do hope it gets fixed. Has anyone communicated this issue directly to Sager and/or Clevo?

Because somehow it seems they are not aware of it, as the issue keeps popping up on discussions and in many cases support staff of the resellers are not aware of this problem. And if Sager/Clevo is not aware of it, it will not get fixed of course :-/

 

I am sure Sager is aware of the situation as they have customers of their own as well, it's just hard to implement a change of a magnitude like that midstream as then you have some models with one set of hardware and another with another set. So changes like this are generally saved for the next model revision. If you have a reseller that is refusing to acknowledge that there is an issue, I'd look into reviewing your purchasing criteria, but as you mentioned this is the way the system is designed and there is only so much that can be done about it.