recurrent speaker failures

[enkephalin07]

My problem and the fix resembles this: http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Audio/HP-Envy-15-3040nr-Sound-Stopped-working/td-p/2673061

I have been routinely uninstalling, depowering, resetting, rebooting an average of 3 times per week since May. And I've become very efficient at it through practice, but not efficient enough for this to be a satisfactory solution! The issue has become far too disruptive, and I need a more permanent solution.

The problem is that the speakers will fail completely, though a headset with mic still works. This is typically while running applications that play many voice samples, though extended play of music with lyrics or movies with dialog aren't ever the cause of the issue. These speaker failures accompany an uncharacteristic overheating in the further left corner of the board, beginning approximately from around the power button and spreading in all directions, moreso beneath the laptop than across the keyboard. This is probably the vicinity of the video card and processor, but GPU usage appears to have minor bearing on failure occurences.

Cooling the air around the laptop delays but doesn't prevent the speaker failure, and as you can imagine it's become a costly kludge over the summer. I have cleaned out the vents with compressed air and electronics cleaners so restriction of airflow wouldn't exacerbate the problem.

All drivers are all up-to-date, but would a different audio driver solve this, or perhaps removing Beats Audio from the installation?

[DavidSMP]

Hi @enkephalin07,

Thank you for posting your question in the HP community, a great place to get support and resolutions from experts in the community. I read your post about  the speakers failing over time and you need to perform different steps to resolve it only for it to fail again. It will be a delight to assist you.

At the outset, I need to commend you on your troubleshooting skills. I am really impressed with it. Such exhaustive, copious and extensive troubleshooting speaks of great technical expertise. You have been very thorough in performing these steps. Kudos to you for trying a different headset also to isolate the issue. That was amazing! The motherboard sound drivers are fine if the headset works correctly. It is not driver related.

The fact that there are some overheating issues also point to a hardware issue. Please run diagnostics on the computer and speakers. (complete diagnostics, HDD, memory ,fan and component tests)

Please follow these steps to run the diagnostics:

1. Hold the power button for at least five seconds to turn off the computer.
2. Turn on the computer and immediately press the F2 key repeatedly, about once every second.

1. The HP PC Hardware Diagnostics (UEFI) main menu is displayed.

If any test fails I request you to make a note of the failure code. You could also update the bios if it has not been done already for overheating issues. Visit this link to update the bios:  http://hp.com/drivers

If any component fails, please contact HP phone support to get the unit serviced. Please visit this link to do this: http://hp.com/contacthp  Select the region and language. Then enter the product# of the unit and follow the instructions on the screen to contact phone support.

A good link for audio related issues that you might want to check:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05207095

If the tests pass, you could also run a system recovery as a last resort after backing up all your files as it resets the computer to factory settings.

Hope things work great for you and the computer issues are resolved without hassles. Let me know how this goes. Please mark this post as “Accepted  Solution” if it helps. Kudos would also be appreciated for my efforts by clicking the “Thumbs Up” button. Take care and have a splendid week ahead.

[enkephalin07]

Updated BIOS, and UEFI while I was at it. No component failed testing, even the audio test worked after I had uninstalled the audio driver, though it was faint and tinny as if it were running on Win10's default High Def Audio driver. I booted back up and tested until the speakers failed again.

I've already seen the audio link you referred me to, and went through all the steps.  Step 3) The headphones always still function with IDT's driver and Step 6) is the only step that reliably works every time.

I don't believe it can be overlooked that the speaker failure only occurs from playing voice clips, to include voice chat, games with voiced dialog and voice editing. It cannot be overlooked that I can play 24-hour music for weeks on end without interruption, or that I can watch a 3-day marathons of shows without losing the sound.

[DavidSMP]

Hi @enkephalin07,

I thank you very much for your quick response. Brilliant work again to isolate the issue correctly. Yes, we certainly cannot discount the fact that the speaker failure only occurs from playing voice clips, to include voice chat, games with voiced dialog and voice editing. To further isolate the issue I request you to try a new user account and check how that goes. Please back up all your important files and information.  Then as a last resort please perform a system recovery to restore the unit to factory settings to check how things work. We really thank you for all the copious troubleshooting that you have done. We greatly value your business with HP. I hope things work great for you and the computer and the issue is corrected.

 Hope this works. Please keep me informed. Please mark this post as “Accepted  Solution” if it helps. Kudos would also be appreciated for my efforts by clicking the “Thumbs Up” button. Take care and have a splendid week ahead.

[enkephalin07]

I tried a newly created user account and logged in with a fresh re-install of the IDT package, but speakers failed within hours. I'm not ready to employ a "Scorched Earth" fix, not without evidence that it would do anything other than confirm what's already known; or worse, confirm that what's unknown is still unknown.

Spoiler

I doubt this has anything to do with it, but can you explain why a multiregional installation would need to run in non-Unicode when the OS's native region is set to a Unicode language? While I'm installing hardware isn't the best time to practice my Japanese.

[DavidSMP]

Hi @enkephalin07, 

I thank you very much for your response. As I was on a long weekend I could not get back to you immediately. I read you post. First off ,there is a possible hardware issue with the unit. There is something  more to it than meets the eye. So I request you to contact phone support to get the unit fixed.  The overheating  issues that you experience could also be hardware related as it happens while playing games or watching videos which are when the speakers also begin to fail. We have tried every possible step and I think you have done everything from your end. Please visit this link to contact phone support: http://hp.com/contacthp

Please make sure to backup your files and then send the unit for repair as it may be reset to original factory settings and that could cause you to lose data. Regarding the other question, Please visit these  links given below to change the operating system support to localized versions. 

Regarding the other issue, please perform this step:

Open Region and Language by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking Clock, Language, and Region, and then clicking Region and Language. Click the Administrative tab, and then, under Language for non-Unicode programs, click Change system locale. (this may be happening  because of a glitch)

Link:http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-start/how-to-change-system-locale-in-win...

Link 2: https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/int_pr_select_langua...

Link 3 : http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-start/how-to-change-system-locale-in-win...

Link 4: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144258(v=sql.105).aspx

Hope things work great for you and the computer issues are resolved without hassles. Let me know how this goes. Please mark this post as “Accepted  Solution” if it helps. Kudos would also be appreciated for my efforts by clicking the “Thumbs Up” button. Take care and have a splendid week ahead.

[enkephalin07]

@DavidSMP: "The overheating  issues that you experience could also be hardware related as it happens while playing games or watching videos which are when the speakers also begin to fail."

Not videos, as I stated above. When I posted that I could watch a 3 day marathon of shows, you could assume those play on some video format. Like music, videos play contiguously, unlike a video game which samples a library of audio clips at varying frequency. Playing video doesn't even cause the overheating that usually accompanies a speaker failure.

"Regarding the other issue, please perform this step:"

Changing it requires a reboot, and  because I'll still have a reason to choose Shift-JIS for correctly displaying non-Unicode characters, I will have to reboot to change it back. This is in addition to the reboot that the installer will require. 'System locale' is a misleading term, as it isn't system language at all, and it's suppose to be applied as an exception, not a rule.

Thank you for the time you've taken to help me solve this problem. I had kind of expected the hardware would have to be serviced and was putting off that option.

[DavidSMP · Accepted solution]

Hi @enkephalin07,

You've been technically brilliant. It has been a privilege to have worked with a person of such caliber and levels of technical expertise.I have also tried everything that I could think off to correct the situation. Besides the issue happens intermittently and you need to go through the annoying process of hard reset and the rest of it that you described in your first post to have it up and running. You need to do this periodically which signifies that there's more to it than meets the eye and with a hardware service the issue perhaps could be corrected. 

As a last resort, I have actually referred you to contact HP phone support to get the computer serviced for all the issues that you have currently with it. Please try to do it at your convenience. I genuinely hope that things work great for you and the machine remains healthy for a long time to come once you get it serviced.

To simply say thanks, please click the "Thumbs Up" button. If you require further assistance let me know and I will gladly do all I can to help.  You take care now and have a great day ahead.