Hey

I bought a laptop in march of this year every thing was fine had Realtek ac'97 audio chip and sounded fine to me, now i've bought the exact same model of laptop again, and it comes with the Realtek HD audio chip, its for college so im only using 2 labtec desktop speakers but the sound is rubbish, it sounds very tinny and lacks bass , have the latest drivers but no difference, can't enjoy my music (Encoded in -V2 so its not the music and the speakers are the same ones from home) is there any way i could go back to ac'97 audio say with a different driver or am i stuck with this sound.

Thanks in advance.

I have same problem Have any solution on this problem? Without buy new external sound card ;]

Most laptop OEMs skimp on the integrated audio. You'll more than likely have to go with an external solution, or a PC Card one.

Seems the problem is not with the Realtek HD chip then.

Well, if he used the AC97 with another pair of speaker, you're certainly true...I have a laptop with HD AUDIO and sounds very good when connected to my good old sansui amplifier (a 25 years old model)

I had the exact same problem with my notebook, and I ended up buying an Audigy 2 ZS Laptop. The old ac '97 sounded way better than the Realtek HD Audio chip IMO.

Edit: small correction

This is a common problem with laptops. Some manufacturers skimp on the coupling capacitor, and if you plug in a 32 ohm load, your bass goes walkies.

I use one of the little USB sticks that puts out 2-channel audio. Works like a charm.

I do a fair amount of demos that require me using my laptop during talks. My Toshiba (eee, buzzz, chirp whistle hiss) headphone is completely useless for such endeavors.

I believe that Microsoft has attempted to deal with this problem to some extent with their WHQL requirements for Vista, but I fear that manufacturers may simply refuse to bother. I know there's a public web page out there somewhere, but I don't recall where. If anyone cares I can try to find it.

If its just bass thats the issue, run RMAA on it to generate a frequency graph, and then use the EQ in foobar (or whatever) to correct the imperfections in it's response.

If it's the same problem I had, this won't help. I'll do an RMAA scan with my Audigy. Let's find a cable...

Edit: Here's the result: Spectrum.png

I'm quite surprised that the Audigy graph looks so bad.

Edit2: Sorry about that, but the previous results are completely invalid. I had originally installed just the drivers for the Audigy 2 ZS, without any of the software, to prevent any strange effects from being installed with the driver. Unfortunately, this led to the driver being installed with some strange effect enabled, and no option to disable it since the configuration software was missing .

I have just reinstalled the drivers, this time *with* the config software, and disabled the effect. Frequency response looks much more like expected now, and crosstalk vanished. Man, I hate those creative drivers.

The correct graph can be found here: Spectrum2.png

The graph titled Audigy was the result of using my Audigy 2 ZS Laptop for both record and playback, the "Realtek" graph was created by again recording with the Audigy, but playing back with the Realtek HD Audio chip.

Edit3: Cut some now useless text. This is the last edit to this post, promised

That graph is what I see on my Toshiba laptop with a Realtek ALC861 HD audio codec. I used a VST host spectrum analyzer to monitor the loopback ADC with several versions of Realtek drivers, up to the most recent ones, 1.85. The only way I've been able to get a flat bass response is by installing ASIO4ALL and using the ASIO out dlls for Winamp and Foobar2000. I think the original MS drivers may not have the problem, but MS completely buries the loopback ADC, so I can't verify that. RT drivers allow loopback to be enabled and used for recording from the DAC output.

This looks like only the left and right channels of a 2.1 system are going to the speakers. And it doesn't change when headphones are plugged in. The RT 1.84 and 1.85 drivers know when the headphones are plugged in, but the bass is still missing from the output.

Has anybody figured out how to get the bass cuttoff filter out of the direct sound stack? I'm thinking about trying some more older drivers in case Realtek ever made a working version, but for now I'm satisfied with ASIO4ALL. Installing Realtek drivers is a pain.

EDIT: Rolling back to the native vista sound driver, MS instead of RT, DOES fix the bass problem. I've tried the Toshiba OEM drivers 1.56, 1.60, and Realtek 1.80, 1.84, and 1.85 but all of them are missing the bass.

Thanks for any help,
dd_wizard

Hi guys, I have an Acer 7720G laptop and I am experiencing lot of audio problems with the Realtek HD sound card... First of all there are a lot of sound skipping when the CPU load is high. I have noticed this problem with R1.89 and R1.90 drivers from Realtek.
Secondly, I want to use mic in and wave recording simultaneously (for example, record a playing mp3 and speak over it at the same time). I have tried every possible setting and none has the result I want.
With SB Audigy and kx drivers I am able to do whatever I want with the sound card. And here comes my final question : Are there any similar drivers for Realtek HD as kx are for EMU10Kx chipsets??

thanx a lot in advance