Sony vaio sound quality

Dear visitors,
I brought Sony Vaio VPC EB15FM yesterday.
But i am surprised about the sound quality.
Sound quality is low and also sound volume is
low.Some time get noise.I am very much upset about this.
Please help me how can i solve this problem?

 

First : do not expect too much of a notebook internal speakers. You might find the sound better with your own configuration.

Two : if that's stille not good, buy external speakers.

 

Well, for one, Sony's notebooks are DEFINITELY not known for their built in speakers. They are among the worst IMO... But define the above. What do you mean by noise?

 

I like the sound quality, it has its special thing. It can be vary loud on my F12 with no noise or cracks from the internal speakers.

 

Thanks for reply.
Please clear me details. I am using Sony Vaio VPC EB15FM

 

Sony laptops have poor speakers, however judging from my own Vaio Z, I can say that if headphones are plugged in, they sound better than MacBook Pros with headphones plugged in.

 

Sony notebook speakers are unfortunately behind the curve compared to many of the other notebook manufacturers. I had the pleasure of trying out Dell's new studio 1749 a month or so back and the speakers on that are surprisingly good for such tiny little things.

Broadly, the laws of physics always apply so producing low frequency sound at high amplitude is difficult to impossible for a small driver and low cabinet volume. They just can't move the necessary volume of air with each excursion. That said, I was impressed by the little JBLs on the Dell considering the driver sizes they worked with and the loudness and bass they managed to get out of them. If you crank them (awww ) the chasis even vibrates. Since very low bass is more 'felt' than 'heard' I thought that was such a nice touch to feel the rumble through the palmrest.

I get the impression that Sony's built in notebook speakers are more or less an afterthought, that it is expected the user will use a nice pair of headphones or in the case of their multimedia notebooks, simply run the optical out into a hifi.

 

Do you guys also experience background noise with the Z? I also have a weird issue that when I dont have sound in my system and exploring folders, this clicking sound is followed by a cracking sound like when you disconnect your headphones or so. This is very annoying. I try to get a driver update for the Realtek soundcard.

Any thoughts?

 

DPC Latency. The cracking/popping noise is caused by your video drivers, believe it or not. Try updating them, or maybe just a different driver version. Are you hearing it through the headphone port too?

 

No. I am not tried with head phone yet.
I am using Sony Vaio VPC EB15FM.
Can u tell me where i can find latest
update driver of this model??

 

That model has the GMA HD, so get these from Intel.

 

I only hear that through the headphones. Through the speakers it is fine, maybe because it is not loud enough.
I use Bose QuietComfort 15 headphones.

 

Try disabling the mic and cd audio.

 

ALL laptops of poor quality built-in speakers. It is physically impossible to reproduce the lowest few octaves of the audible spectrum at usable volumes without larger speaker drivers (6-10 inches minimum), let alone using a single loudspeaker driver per channel. This is not a unique property to Sony laptops.

 

There are many many things that this could be and the description of the problem is too vague to point to solutions without knowing more. What does the noise sound like? Is it a hum? Does it cycle? Does it sound like its correlated to the activity of another device? (i.e. hard drive)

Mostly pops/skips/crackles are caused by DMA buffer underruns. DPC latency and misbehaving system drivers can play a part in that.

It could simply be that you listening WAY too loud and you are clipping kmixer in which case you just need to turn the damn volume down. It could be a dud headphone (in which case, try a different pair and see if the problem still exists).

If you have Dolby Virtual Speaker (surround sound simulator) on then turn it off. If that doesn't work try turning off your mic. Report back when you are done with this list so we can start ticking off things that it definitely isn't.

 

Do not know what to say, Sony modells lack base. Other manufacturers like Dell XPS Studio or Asus multimedia laptops has 2.1 systems, sony has 2.0 system.

Thought it was Realtek? because it has the dolby thing v3 (in sweden ).

Realtek

 

There's poor quality, and then there's Sony-poor quality. Any average cell phone has far superior speakers to a $3000 Vaio Z.

 

Ok it is hard for me to explain the issue, I will try:

- The sound is cracking like the soundcard is activated and deactivated somehow
- The sound occurs only when my system is 100% silent and I click through the browser as the following sequence:
_silent____(click)_crack_"explorer folder change clicking sound"___~2.8sec___crack_silent

The silent phase means there is absolutely no noise like I have my headphones disconnected. In the phase between the on and off cracks, there is a little bit, silent noise swoosh like you would expect to be when you have your headphones connected to a tape drive with an empty tape playing.

- The sounds appear on all volume levels.
- I have tried both the original Realtek and the Sony drivers, same behavior.
- If I have music playing (even when very low volume) and doing some browsing I don't have cracking sounds at all.

I hope it is clearer now what kind of issue I got. Thanks for your help in advance.

 

Ok, we are making progress. I know it doesn't look like it but these things are about eliminating probables.

Do the following:

1) I want you to go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer. Click on 'System'. Do you see any errors in the system log? In particular, I'm thinking of DMA errors but it could really be any number of things but ehh.

I had a problem vaguely similar to yours a long time where I got several DMA errors in a row, my primary hard drive reverted to PIO mode which is very slow and I started to get serious buffer underruns when making music which resulted in lots of pops/clicks/stutters/crackles. The problem was traced back to a dud IDE cable. The giveaway was the constant HDD activity and the frequency of stutters correlated to excessive HDD activity.

2) Run DPC Latency checker in the background whilst you go about your normal tasks and see if theres a lag spike that occurs around about the same time as you hear crackling noises. Post a screenshot of DPCLatency checker if you see this occurring.

 

Thanks for your tips. I had a look into the System Logs and there were no errors today since I booted my computer. There are a few warnings showing that I disconnected from the wired network and stuff but nothing like you mentioned.

I also downloaded and gave DPC latency checker a shot but seems everything is OK there. (See Pic) When I had that running I continuously produced those horrible cracking sounds by clicking forward in Windows Media Player (when I skip through my playlists I got cracks everytime I hit the next button). I now can also confirm that this cracking sound is also played through the built-in speakers - with the media player method I could reproduce that easily.



Annoying...

 

These sudden sound cut-offs and clicks indeed seem to be driver related. I have NOT suffered these clicks on Vista, which my VGN-Z came preinstalled with. (Clean) Install Windows 7 however (with Sony's latest drivers too), these cracks and clicks are common. Example, playing a movie (regardless of resolution), and I open a IE window; slight clicks and cracks in the sound output.

It never did that in Vista. That said, W7 does have the DXVA which Vista doesn't. Maybe that is the issue here?

 

It's interesting to read this - the only mention I can find of this problem on the net. I've got a Vaio EB1E0E, i3 with W7.

I also get background noise, only detectable through (decent) headphones but annoying and loud enough to be fustrating.

The noise is constant (like a digital background hiss) and cannot be disabled by any of the following:
muting, updating drivers as discussed above, closing programs (eg iTunes). It continues until the laptop is completed switched off.

Interestingly however, it is not present while running on batteries.

The poor quality inbuilt speakers I'll have to live with but hopefully this can be fixed!

 

In that case, it's likely noise from the external power supply, or from an external source on your local power grid that passes through your power supply, or from radio signals being picked up by the power cable.
(All of which admittedly should be filtered out by the 19V -> 12/5/3.3V power converter inside the Vaio, but it might not have been designed with audio in mind.)

Try clamping a ferrite core on to the cable next to where it enters the computer. Then try clamping it on the wall side of the power supply. If it helps in one or both of the positions, it will tell you whether it's the power supply or noise on the local grid that is noisy. If it's on the power grid, you can take it around the house and clamp it on one cable after another until you find the culprit. (I have an aquarium pump that generated noise until I put it on a filtered UPS).
And if it helps only if it's clamped on the Vaio side right next to the computer, but not if on the Vaio side next to the power supply, you're likely picking up RF noise from a nearby transmitter.
In either case, the ferrite core might be a viable workaround.

And if it doesn't help, a ferrite core costs around $3-5, and can be useful other places, so it's no big loss.

 

Excellent, thanks for the advice. I've ordered a ferrite core and will let you know if it works. Will also try to test it out by plugging in at other locations and see if others are having the same issues.

 

An update...

I bought and fitted a ferrite core - tried it in various positions with no effect.

More recently I visited a Sony Centre with a pair of earphones, which was interesting. There models that are essentially the same as mine suffered the same annoying background noise. But a similar model powered by an AMD processor did not.

Any thoughts on what this means?

Cheers, Ben.

 

The only exception for me in speakers quality was the Vaio SZ. for me it has incredible and powerfull sound quality in a 13 inch notebook...

 

I have the same problem! I have a CA. It seems to only happen with system sounds. I've posted this problem on like 10 different forums and never got a reply. I can't believe someone else finally knows what I've been talking about...

I hate it so much, it's so annoying. My Toshiba doesn't do this, why should the Sony? I'm really tired of computers not working right. It's the little things like this that make me want to go back to Apple...

 

So bump and update:

The crackling/clicking thing that I noticed does not happen while on the battery. It only happens when the computer is plugged in.

GREAT.

It can't be the local grid for me, because I used my computer in several different counties the past week and it happened everywhere I went. It's caused by the power adapter. I guess this is a no-win situation, huh?

Is it possible this is because the adapter is ungrounded? If I were to use a grounded adapter, would it work?

 

Well you shouldn't use electronics without a ground path anyway because you know, electric shock hazard.

This thread is kind of old and we never got to the root of the problem because we still don't know what the problem is exactly. "Crackling/clicking" describes a whole range of problems to do with DMA buffer underruns. The cause could be any number of things.

One thing I did notice on my desktop PC is that certain drivers/services really mess up my soundcard in a bad way, such as the nVidia stereoscopic 3d service. For me, disabling that actually stops WDM from disintegrating into a stuttering mess. That was the end result of about 1 month of troubleshooting trying to figure out why I couldn't play live sound without underruns despite running huge DMA buffers and having no DPC/ISR latency problems at all. I even bought an ADS Pyro to eliminate the possibility of the firewire chipset being bad. Well, now at least I have 3 extra firewire 400 ports...

 

Without a third prong on the adapter, then there is no ground effective. It doesn't matter if the electricity source has a ground path, without that third prong on the plug, nothing is going to happen. That's why I'm annoyed the Sony only uses ungrounded adapters. So does Toshiba.

 

I don't believe a third prong is required as long as the plug is polarized. I.E. one of the two prongs is wider than the other. The modern electrical standards then guarantee the correct grounding and you cannot physically plug it in the wrong way.

 

Could this be noise from the charging circuit? Do you notice any change when the battery gets fully charged? Won't be a great change, because the mains is still powering the laptop, but at least the battery load will not be there.

 

The three prongs are phase or live, neutral and ground or earth. Neutral is not ground.

Laptop adapters put out two pins for DC connection to the laptop. This is isolated from the mains - floating - so there is no danger of shock. The ground pin in the adapter is there to help filter the noise in the power lines, either from other sources or generated by the adapter itself. This noise is dumped into the ground wire, and that is why it is connected.

 

I stand corrected.

 

Not really about that - we are all here to learn and help each other out as best we can. I've learned plenty since I got here.

 

I found that connection headphone out to and outside amp I got a lot of interference noise. The solution was to unground the laptop power supply using a 2 prong adapter. Noise gone.
But even with that there is some noise coming out of my VGN-Z which is cured by using the ground lift switch on my headphone amp. Strangely only my VGN has this problem. VPC-Z and Z-21 don't need the ground lifted on the amp and sound is very good and better then on VGN-Z, better bass and higher output voltage, better signal to noise.

 

I'm always wary of defeating ground to fix a ground loop but notebooks have external transformers so I guess the risk of the chassis turning live is very low.

At least you now know that you have a ground loop so there are many potential fixes that don't involve ground lifting, like using an isolation transformer or a direct injection (DI) box. You can pick up a DI box for something silly cheap like 10 bucks.

 

Maybe the mains ground is picking up noise from somewhere. If you know what you're doing, you could try a different ground, like the water pipes.

 

The point in my case to not have *multiple* ground connections, not to have none at all. No Di needed in this case and it degrades sound quality.

On the new Z2 the breakout box has a big grounding problem which didn't exist on previous Z models.

 

Is your external amp powered using a 2 pin power cord? If so, try reversing the plug.