Windows 10: New Beats Audio Realtek driver, Same Terrible Sound Leveing/Fluctiation

[ham123]

teamtech,

First off let me wish everyone a Happy New Year!  I was in Denver, CO for Christmas and New Years. Sure hope this is the year that HP gets the audio fixed!  I'll bet M$ hopes everyone buy's a Surface Pro and not an HP, however, not sure if even the Surface Pro works.

Ham123

[ShonkaiDJ]

Happy new year to you too!!

[Andos86]

Hi Guys,

I assume the issue I have is related to yours - ie. a driver issue. My beatsaudio control panel provides a significant improvement for the internal speakers and wired headphones. However, when connecting my bluetooth stereo, the beats control panel has no effect on the audio, it appears to be disabled, despite the checkbox being enabled. I've reinstalled the realtek drive and my bluetooth driver, with no change. Any suggestions ? Do you think it's the same issue as your level fluctuation drama? 
I cant recall if this occured with Win8, I upgraded pretty quickly (mistake).

Cheers.

Envy Notepad (L2Z18PA#ABG), win10.

[lbrou87]

Happy New Year to everyone!  Glad to see people are still voicing their frustration about this sound fluctuation problem.  All it would take is a driver update, and the issues will no longer be there. 

[Smoothjazz14]

Hello, it's so refreshing to come across this post; I thought I was losing my mind! A recent wrinkle that I've noticed to this problem on my Envy-17j013cl is that after installing Windows 10 the device selection doesn't automatically switch from the speaker driver to the headphone driver when headphones are plugged in. While this helps somewhat with the "auto-compression" the low end frequencies are distorted. This results in a compression of your midrange freqs and a nasty clipping of the low end freqs. By using the Beats Audio EQ you can fix the clipping a little but there's nothing that can be done about the compression. Has anyone found a workaround yet as it seems that HP will never address this issue? Will a generic audio driver work?

[GrrrHP]

Installing Windows 10 or updating a Windows version or even doing a Windows update in your current version of Windows, can automatically install the device driver for your device. Under normal conditions, this is what you would want but in this case it means also being forced to be stuck with Beats audio filters. As far as i could gather with my limited knowledge of device drivers, the Beats audio is just few software filters that are co-installed when installing the Device driver for your audio device. You would think that would make the separation of driver and Beats filters (Beats filters are actually just made by different companies and sleuthed together), but so far that hasn't been done. Probably all contractual nonsense reasons.

So far the only "solution" is to revert to the standard Microssoft windows audio driver.

I would suggest to leave the Realtek HD audio driver installed, since it can come automatically back in the Windows update or when uninstalling.

All you have to do is to go to device manager (right-click Windows menu icon -> click device manager -> click open: Sound video, game controllers -> click on tab for device driver -> click uppdate driver software button -> browse my computer for driver software -> let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer, select High Definition Audio Device, select next, and follow the instructions to install it.

That should install the Microsoft version of the audio driver and might not properly stear your speakers, but will circumvent Beats audio filters.

Hope this helps you too.

[Smoothjazz14]

GrrrHP,

Thanks for the advice: there were good results and bad results. The good results were that the sound coming through the headphones were more stable across the frequency spectrum; the bad news is the when the headphones are unplugged then the sound seems as if it's coming from a cup: no high or low end and muffled unless the volume is set to 25.

Moral of this experience: get a Mac or a Dell?

[lbrou87]

After one year of originally posting this issue, there's still no solutiion nor any HP rep even touching this thread.  That in itself speaks volumes.  Also,  I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up high since this issue was there since 2012. 

Now that I use my laptop as it is intended--a mobile computer, I rely more and more on my laptop speakers.  Having the "High Definition Audio Device" driver gives virtually shallow and low sound to those speakers.  So I have to choose whether I want clean and crisp sound from my external speakers/headphones or have pretty good sounding laptop speakers. 

I reiterate...I will NEVER buy another HP device. Also, since I work with a company that takes suggestions from their engineers to heart, I will GUARANTEE that they don't buy any HP devices as well. 

ALL THIS TAKES TO GET FIXED IS A DRIVER UPDATE!

[Raik]

Try this solution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp5LYGh_5ck

And call me in the morning.

No seriously, this may be the definitive fix.

[GrrrHP]

Raik!! Thank you very much!!

This essentially solved the issue for me.

The process however wasn't entirely as straightforward for me, but that was because after deinstalling the Realtek drivers / reboot / extracting the instaler, there was no folder with the Realtek drivers for me. I solved that problem by getting the drivers from the zip version of the driver and follow basically the same steps and manually made Windows look in the correct folder (Vista64). Then i chose the HDX.inf file and it came up with the list of Realtek drivers and just choose the last option with signed drivers. So, for those who try this method, you might run into similar issues, but the HDX.inf file seems to install the Realtek driver / Control panel without beats.
I did some research into the installation process before and found that the Driver installer apperently picks different inf files for installing the drivers and beats audio depending on your machine's specifications; I'm personally not knowledgeble enough to find out how it exactly worked, so i didn't advise it to anyone.

Anyway, once again: Thanks for this info and credit where it belongs. "My solution" was also based on someone elses work, but i won't mention that person since i have no idea if that person has an issue with that and i also forgot because i really wanted this issue fixed and lost focus of the work of others. Look it up on Youtube if you want to know.

Thanks to all who worked on this issue.

HP are you reading this!? Wake up and start listening to your clients and help them with simple, fixable issues. HP might be technically not in the wrong here, but that's still a poor excuse to not listen to genuine clients complaints.