HP Spectre X360 awful audio quality

[thinwh1teduke]

I have just bought my spectre X360 a month ago, so far a decent machine however the audio quality is awful. Everything sounds distorted, muddy and crackles or vibrates when played. Considering this is a premium machine and supposedly has Bang & Olufson speakers this must be a hardware fault?

[banhien]

@thinwh1teduke 

What is your HP Spectre X360 ?  Updating Audio driver may help. But what is your machine ?  Please read

     https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Printers-Knowledge-Base/How-to-ask-a-question-on-this-forum-to-get-the...

Regards.

[thinwh1teduke]

Hi Thanks for the reply. My machine is Spectre x360 - 13 -aw0053na. 

I have manually updated the audio drivers and the BIOS since posting this question after finding similar threads on here and other forums however the problem persists. (notably none of the other threads have a solution, just people advising the OP's to update the drivers etc. which doesn't appear to work for anybody).

It seems to be the right hand speaker mainly. The sound is tinny and vibrates horribly when sounds of a certain frequency are played. It is rendering some podcasts, music and programmes unplayable for me due to the sound quality being so low. 

My other laptop is a £200 lenovo and the sound quality on that is far superior to this machine which cost about 8x as much!

[GianPietro]

Hi, it seems I have a very similar issue on my Spectre x360 15-df1001nl, which I've had for less than 2 weeks.

I hear clipped audio mainly at frequencies between 300 and 500 Hz. The problematic speaker seems mainly the right one, and the issues almost disappears when in tablet mode (keyboard facing down).

Updated Bios, Windows and drivers, but nothing changed.

I think that in my case the problem is caused by the keyboard, the keys seem to vibrate at those frequencies: while playing a constant 350Hz tune, gently touching the keys seems to modify the amount of resonance, and I just verified that pushing a pillow on the keyboard was temporarily greatly improving the issue. 

Hope this helps and sorry for my English

[thinwh1teduke]

Hi thanks for the reply. I think you are correct in that it is vibrations. I have just played a constant 500hz sound and as I increase the volume there is a horrible vibration distortion coming from the right hand side. When I press on the laptop to the right of the touchpad it stops the vibration. This seems like very poor build quality. I've also noticed my touchpad is loose which I've seen many other people complaining about going back several years.

Do you think it can be solved by tightening something or should I return the machine?

You would think the quality control would be better on such an expensive machine 😕

[GianPietro]

Apart from the keyboard, the keys arent't perfectly steady on a horizontal plane, everything on my laptop seems well built, including chassis and  touchpad.

Anyway I would not try messing around with a brand new machine, you could end up voiding your warranty and ruining some components; the problem is HP's fault, and i suppose that they should solve it. Instead I would hear what HP employees say about that, if they recognize the issue and accept to repair/swap your notebook.

And yes, the quality control/manufacturing precision has to improve, because it makes very good speakers become unusable and people regret how they spent their money.