P170EM + RealTek - OUCH

mercilesskiller · 5 Feb 2013 at 08:36

Hi All,

Recently bought a P170EM and for some unknown reason, even though I'm using the latest drivers from the Clevo site, I get hardly any bass using headphones! I have some UE700's which are beautiful on my phone, but when plugged into the laptop they sound horrible.

Using the RealTek HD Audio Manager it appears in "Stereo" setting there is 0 bass and lots of tinny noise. In 5.1 or 7.1 mode the sounds a lot better but still no bass (and no voices watching TV stuff).

I have the THX Pro application but regardless of whether that's on or off, there's no real difference.

I don't understand how a full on laptop can produce such a bad sound compared to my phone...!

Please can anyone advise on how on earth to sort this out? I'm using the headphones in the speaker port next to the mic. Driver is 6.0.1.6662. Win 8 64bit

Cheers!

ninja2000 · 5 Feb 2013 at 10:53

the audio out is a known weakness on clevo laptops. Although I haven't got a P170EM I have had a few Clevo's and they always had terrible speakers and terrible audio jack quality! There is always a lot of people moaning about audio quality on other notebook forums.

I ended up buying a USB soundcard.

Have you tried removing the realtek drivers and just using the windows audio drivers? Not a long term solution, just a test to see if it a realtek driver issue.

mercilesskiller · 5 Feb 2013 at 14:21

ninja2000 said:
the audio out is a known weakness on clevo laptops. Although I haven't got a P170EM I have had a few Clevo's and they always had terrible speakers and terrible audio jack quality! There is always a lot of people moaning about audio quality on other notebook forums.

I ended up buying a USB soundcard.

Have you tried removing the realtek drivers and just using the windows audio drivers? Not a long term solution, just a test to see if it a realtek driver issue.

I have not but very interesting idea... Though I wonder if Windows will just auto detect and use Realtek drivers anyway? Will give that a go tonight.

Marsman · 5 Feb 2013 at 14:46

It probably will use the Realtek drivers. You could use a driver cleaner to remove the Realtek ones completely.

ninja2000 · 5 Feb 2013 at 14:56

I uninstalled realtek and rolled back to MS drivers before. Had an issue with a xps1647 years ago and the realtek drivers caused no end of trouble, ended up using MS drivers for months whilst Dell sorted it out

mercilesskiller · 6 Feb 2013 at 10:44

I'm surprised no one has a reply yet about a nicer fix for the issue.

Such an expensive high device should surely have a way to make sound work

d_brennen · 6 Feb 2013 at 11:02

A Fiio E10 DAC is likely the best solution tbh, it's sadly a design problem. Head over to notebookreview and see numerous posts regarding the woeful audio