Exploring laptop sound
As mentioned elsewhere, now have a laptop with reasonable internal sound, a HP Compaq 6830S (not a Pavillion, sorry!) of quite some vintage. My mainstay Dell over many years prior lost its sound many years ago, a USB port got cooked, and took down the sound circuitry at the same time; and what I was using as an interim, another Dell of nominally very good quality, had downright faulty sound, buzzed and rattled - was plain sick ...
OK, so the exercise here will be to see how good I can get the newly "installed" HP unit's sound to be, by my measures, using minimal or zero internal hardware tweaking - essentially working out what factors impact the sound, and whether the negatives can be circumvented. This gives an idea of how I go about things, what I use to "measure" with, what I'm listening for.
Trying a couple of CDs that I use often the signs were good - obviously no bass, and the volume is very restricted, but otherwise the sound was 'correct' - the music sounded like it was meant to, not like some of the bizarre caricatures that often very expensive systems project, :p .
No obvious faults, except for some slight bzzz'ng from plastic vibrating on big bass notes; but, plenty of flaws, main one being "tiny" sound, it came across exactly as the laptop looks, just a small pimple in the room, acoustically. What I'm aiming for is to get the sound to be pleasurable to listen to, rather than just a basic means of listening to audio from the Net.
[I]Why [/I]is the sound so "small"? Many would say it's because there is no low frequency information, but in my experience that is not the case - the real reasons are that the treble content is compromised, and low level information is severely clouded, I can't hear the detail that I know is there! This is easily appreciated by listening closely to the speakers while running at maximum, the sound is quite dirty and sludgy, has a blaring, PA, quality to it - that's what I'm going to try to get rid of.
Easy things first: I make sure that the CPU is running under minimum load, in fact the sound in this m/c at the moment does glitch quite badly when the CPU is working too hard, I get a burst of mosquito sound replacing the music - so, I can get CPU usage hovering between 0 and 1% by shutting things down, while no music playing, a good start. Next, I'm using Wi-Fi because there's some funny with the Ethernet, it's not talking to the modem; I switch that possible source of interference off, a physical switch on the keyboard.
Immediate big gain! Initially, I'm using CDs playing in the internal drive and standard Windows Media Player, and the SQ jumps dramatically, a lot of life and sparkle is restored, we're getting somewhere!
Next ... the power brick is plugged in, and it's a cheap, no-name Chinese replacement, the original must have died at some stage. What's it adding to the gunk in the sound chain? The battery is fully charged, so pull the plug from the laptop [I]and[/I] disconnect the mains plug, the brick is dead ... another big gain, this is sounding quite promising.
Left it running at maximum volume on a CD, no cords plugged in, battery power, and as usual the SQ improves steadily from the playing, by about halfway through the disk it's quite decent, a nice sparkle and sense of space in the sound - listening closely to the speakers, the murkiness is much, much less; the sound is filling the room far more, rather than just coming across like a transistor radio playing, :D.
So, very simple things done, with very marked effect - no funnies, or magic stuff done ... just bypassing a couple of the cheap and nasty, quality degrading factors that most people never think about.
I'll continue playing with settings, environment, etc to see how far this evolves ... ;)
OK, so the exercise here will be to see how good I can get the newly "installed" HP unit's sound to be, by my measures, using minimal or zero internal hardware tweaking - essentially working out what factors impact the sound, and whether the negatives can be circumvented. This gives an idea of how I go about things, what I use to "measure" with, what I'm listening for.
Trying a couple of CDs that I use often the signs were good - obviously no bass, and the volume is very restricted, but otherwise the sound was 'correct' - the music sounded like it was meant to, not like some of the bizarre caricatures that often very expensive systems project, :p .
No obvious faults, except for some slight bzzz'ng from plastic vibrating on big bass notes; but, plenty of flaws, main one being "tiny" sound, it came across exactly as the laptop looks, just a small pimple in the room, acoustically. What I'm aiming for is to get the sound to be pleasurable to listen to, rather than just a basic means of listening to audio from the Net.
[I]Why [/I]is the sound so "small"? Many would say it's because there is no low frequency information, but in my experience that is not the case - the real reasons are that the treble content is compromised, and low level information is severely clouded, I can't hear the detail that I know is there! This is easily appreciated by listening closely to the speakers while running at maximum, the sound is quite dirty and sludgy, has a blaring, PA, quality to it - that's what I'm going to try to get rid of.
Easy things first: I make sure that the CPU is running under minimum load, in fact the sound in this m/c at the moment does glitch quite badly when the CPU is working too hard, I get a burst of mosquito sound replacing the music - so, I can get CPU usage hovering between 0 and 1% by shutting things down, while no music playing, a good start. Next, I'm using Wi-Fi because there's some funny with the Ethernet, it's not talking to the modem; I switch that possible source of interference off, a physical switch on the keyboard.
Immediate big gain! Initially, I'm using CDs playing in the internal drive and standard Windows Media Player, and the SQ jumps dramatically, a lot of life and sparkle is restored, we're getting somewhere!
Next ... the power brick is plugged in, and it's a cheap, no-name Chinese replacement, the original must have died at some stage. What's it adding to the gunk in the sound chain? The battery is fully charged, so pull the plug from the laptop [I]and[/I] disconnect the mains plug, the brick is dead ... another big gain, this is sounding quite promising.
Left it running at maximum volume on a CD, no cords plugged in, battery power, and as usual the SQ improves steadily from the playing, by about halfway through the disk it's quite decent, a nice sparkle and sense of space in the sound - listening closely to the speakers, the murkiness is much, much less; the sound is filling the room far more, rather than just coming across like a transistor radio playing, :D.
So, very simple things done, with very marked effect - no funnies, or magic stuff done ... just bypassing a couple of the cheap and nasty, quality degrading factors that most people never think about.
I'll continue playing with settings, environment, etc to see how far this evolves ... ;)
Total Comments 29
Comments
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Might just note that I've reached the target that I placed up in the first post here - that "What I'm aiming for is to get the sound to be pleasurable to listen to". If every tweak is in place then I have no trouble just leaning back and soaking up whatever track is playing - all the right things are coming through, and minimal bad things are happening ... this everyday laptop is getting the job done of delivering the sound that's on the recording without intruding any more than minimally - quite remarkable, really ...Posted 3rd May 2015 at 01:27 PM by fas42
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This is a nuisance ... I did an exercise to track down where the resonance issues are, and unfortunately it's the bits of plastic, etc, that make up the case of the laptop. Created a sine wave sweep through the suspect frequencies, round 600-800Hz. A bad one was at 750Hz, so did a pure 750Hz sine waveform and started pressing on bits of the case while playing continuously - this nicely made the noises come and go! Meaning, I will have to dismantle and try damping various areas of the body of the laptop to get this irritation to go away - is it worth it ??
Unfortunately, big male and female vocals, and very old recordings have lots of these frequencies at high levels, and that makes listening to this material less than brilliant with this added bzzz'ng ...
Will I do something about it? Not sure, will need a bit more motivation to go this extra step ... let it sit for the moment ...Posted 7th May 2015 at 11:57 PM by fas42
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Blu-Tack to the rescue! So thoughtful of HP to "engineer" a cover plate for the speaker area of the laptop, such that it resonated unpleasantly with certain types of musical material, perhaps to encourage the buying of, hopefully HP, external monitors, etc, ;). Yes, this is a type of metal grill, which "sings" quite offensively, especially since it is not tightly bonded to the plastic surround it's mounted in - so, I'm getting a fair distance with careful inserting of gooey muck around the visible perimeter - no dismantling yet - killing a lot of the ringing! It's still trying hard to make noises, so I may have to subtlely bend some of the metal, or place strongish pressure at certain points, to fully deaden it.Posted 9th May 2015 at 01:05 AM by fas42
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Done quite a bit of fiddling with Blu-Tack, can never get it quite perfect, I have a rough Mario Lanza CD here which excites resonance like you wouldn't believe - this is much, much better now but still the metal grille goes into a merry dance, momentarily, while the disk plays. But, I don't want to lift the lid yet - so I'll leave it as a known fault, which can be fixed if I go the extra step ... :).
OK, let's start going backwards, as I mentioned earlier. Just change one thing, undo one tweak, and see what that gives me ... ;)
First up, the playing software: using MediaMonkey (MM) for best performance, so now the m/c is going nicely, just stop MM and swap to Windows Media Player.
To test, using a rough blues recording CD, a no-name compilation that's as dirty as one could want. Track is Crying, by Jimmy Witherspoon, and there is a piano accompanying in the background, a nice tinkly element to the sound.
No contest: Windows player gives me a flat, dead tone to the piano, no sparkle, a transistor radio tone, the life is sucked out of the track. Restore MM, and the piano comes to life, becomes a real instrument, and has a "space" about it.
Windows player does all the wrong things: chews up lots of CPU time, and constantly accesses the CD-ROM drive, and HD. This was an easy one, but serves to give one an instant taste of the type of losses one hears when playback is not optimised.
Edit: Just in case someone immediately runs to this, there is no equalisation going on in any of the software I'm using - this stuff slugs the quality so severely, and I keep right away from the nonsense ...Posted 11th May 2015 at 02:00 AM by fas42
Updated 11th May 2015 at 02:10 AM by fas42 -
Some things to note about the track I just used to easily highlight the player software difference:
* It was nominally a "poor" recording
* I was looking for an instrument or sound element that was in the background, it was not primary in the mix
* That sound element is one that one has a good acoustic memory of - say, real pianos are heard over and over again, and one tends to be able to say immediately whether the instrument sounds 'right'
This is a simple, and very effective way of selecting a music track for evaluating system performance - I use variations of this all the time.Posted 11th May 2015 at 04:50 AM by fas42
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Just to emphasise, yet again, what it means, as people say over and over again in comments about what they hear when they listen to a newly improved component, or refreshed area of the system, or new DIY effort, referring to "improvements in SQ". This is actually code for removing, temporarily or permanently, some handicap, impairment in the playback process - never is the actual source material, the music track, "improved", over and over again - but, an improvement in the integrity of the playback chain may very well have been achieved.
So this is what I'm now doing in reversing some of the tweaks of the laptop - I'm losing a little bit of the integrity, "quality" of the processing of the audio data to produce sound, with each undoing. I've got the laptop to the point where it produces pleasurable sound for as long as I care to listen to it; and the typical result of each "untweaking" is that the sound becomes less pleasurable, there's an edge, uncomfortableness, dullness, lack of life, smallness which is immediately noticeable or which makes me lose interest relatively quickly in what's playing - I want to stop listening.Posted 13th May 2015 at 12:15 AM by fas42
Updated 13th May 2015 at 12:19 AM by fas42 -
Since foobar player is mentioned often, especially in reference to the ABX comparator, I thought it would be a good idea to install the latest version - wasn't there prior - and see how it went. Oh dear!! Immediate reaction to the default installation, absolutely nothing done to optimise anything, first playback - it's awful!!! Dead as a doornail, boring as hell, lifeless as ... I will need to go some number of rounds, to see if I can bring it to life, if this program can be made to behave ... ;)
Edit: OK, probably was too harsh with poor littl' foobar, but all the ridiculous, constant updating of display data was killing the quality, totally - switched off everything, the display is now completely static while playing a track, and the sound is starting to get somewhere ...Posted 13th May 2015 at 11:32 PM by fas42
Updated 13th May 2015 at 11:55 PM by fas42 -
Obviously, lost momentum here ... hopefully will finish it off at some stage - did get somewhere with foobar, but still not enough to supplant MM.
Anyway, found a new, good stress test for playback - Agent Steel, Unstoppable Force - mid 80's speed metal, :). Never heard of this mob before, was put onto the material from the What's Playing thread, was intrigued, and retrieved the compressed audio from YouTube - now, two strikes against it: data compression, detail has been lost; and the recording has everyone going at 100 mph ... how good is the playback on this, ;)? In particular, how well does the drummer's contribution, and vocalist come through?
As a result of this I've altered the settings of MM; I'll run with the new config for a bit and see how it comes together, longer term.Posted 4th July 2015 at 07:33 AM by fas42
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Was a cure for this ever found?Posted 13th August 2016 at 04:12 PM by davym
