How to disable Bang & Olufsen horrible audio correction?

[koivula]

RTT90 dude, thank you! and i  rly mean it

[MarekUK]

Totally mate ! My B&O audio is okay but what's been bugging me here is every time I plug in headphones I get notification which is okay but right after the notification my taskbar goes unclickable ! I can do absolutely nothing with the taskbar ! So I tried get rid off B&O driver coz I used to have just Realtek before Windows reinstallation and taskbar is intact. So apparently B&O drivers may cause trouble with taskbar on some machines. It's kinda annoying having to restart laptop every time taskbar goes "blank" after plugging my earphones in. So I'm sticking with Realtek and I'll live happilly ever after.

[MarekUK]

Yeah I feel ya buddy .... When I was looking out for laptop in store B&O logo seemed like laptop's audio drivers and speakers are fairly good so I went for it. Didn't know I'll be having issues with B&O.

[rthompson181]

I am using a HP Spectre Pro G1 and I found the generic HD audio driver was too tinny on the speakers. I really couldn't stand the change in audio between normal and full screen with the Conexant driver and the Bang and Olufsen utility would not remember changes I made to the settings to make them both the same. Most irritating.

Best way around this I found was to go to C:\Program Files\CONEXANT\SA3\HP-NB-AIO and set a deny permission to Read & Execute on sacpl.exe and SmartAudio3.exe in their file security permissions. It seems SmartAudio3.exe is the program responsible for audio correction, but sacpl.exe calls it on boot so it generated an error on every boot if a Deny permission was set on only SmartAudio3.exe. Blocking them both seemed to fix that without doing any mischief to my speaker quality. Steps I took:

N.B.: You should have some familiarity with ACLs and changing file permissions/ownership before trying to apply the below.

A NOTE OF WARNING - This will potentially cause errors or update failures when updating the audio driver in future as you have essentially denied any read access to this file to all users and to Windows itself. If this causes issues with updates or in general you will need to take ownership of the file and remove the Deny permission. As I already have the newest drivers I cannot test this. In case this happens removal instructions are below.

1. Navigate to C:\Program Files\CONEXANT\SA3\HP-NB-AIO

2. Right click SmartAudio3.exe

3. Click Properties

4. Click the Security tab

5. Click Edit

6. Click Add

7 A dialog box with appear. Set the following:

7a Next to Principle click Select a Principle

7b In the box marked 'Enter the object name to select' type 'Everyone' and click O.K.

7c From the dropdown for Type select Deny

7d Check the box marked Read & Execute (this will automatically check the box below it marked Read)

8. Click O.K. until all dialogs are closed

Repeat for sacpl.exe.

Removal instructions:

1. Right click the file(s) you previously set Deny permissions on

2. Click Properties

3. Click the Security tab

4. Click Advanced

5. Click Change permissions

6. Under Owner click Change Owner

7. Type your username into the box marked 'Enter the object name to select' and press O.K. and then Apply

8. You will receive a warning saying if you have just taken ownership you will need to reopen the security options. Just keep clicking O.K. until everything is closed and you are back to the file in Explorer.

9. Right click the file again

10. Click Properties

11. Click the Security tab

12. Click Edit

13. On the list of permissions (Under 'Group or user names') click on Everyone so it is highlighted - you should see the Deny Read & Execute and Deny Read options are highlighed in the 'Permissions for....' pane

14. Click the Remove button

15 Keep clicking O.K. until all dialog boxes are closed and you are back to the files in Explorer

16. Repeat on any other file you set a Deny permission on

I imagine this would work for similar issues on other models but it may not be exactly the same.

HP: Could you make it a bit easier to remove this utility without needing to mess with ACLs in future, maybe? You shouldn't need to be an I.T. engineer to disable audio 'enhancements'....

[GESWho1]

What a horrible suggestion!  What is the forum for, if not to resolve this type of issue?

[ae91x]

Thanks from the bottom of my heart. Difference is like night and day on my ZBook 15v. My headphones suddenly output premium quality sound rather than a sound akin to an echo microphone toy.

This is why I have trust issues with any and all vendor-installed software.