HP Envy unwanted audio compression?

[Fredopotamus]

I managed to get a very helpful tech last night on my laptop, directly from the hp help icon.  He was able to remote in to my laptop and he uninstalled the IDT driver and rebooted. Not sure if he manually reinstalled it or if it just did itself, but the problem was cured... for now, anyway.

Why would hp continue to ship out new machines with drivers that don't work?

[kyho]

thanks a lot for the info..

i actually uninstalled the IDT driver myself. windows then will install the standard driver automatically (which is not the native IDT one) and with this driver the issue is solved. however the notebook afterwards sounds awful on the notebook speakers because the IDT driver also provided the use of all built in speakers. with the windows driver i only have a very thin ugly sound (headphone is fine though! no compression)

its half a solution for me. i have a HP envy 15 notebook pc j-013sg by the way with this useless beats audio functionality

[kyho]

hi,

it seems like there is still no solution! i have an envy 15 and the compressor issue is gone after letting win install IDT.

BUT the sbwoofers are deactivated which makes the speakers on the notebook unusable.

HP, are we in the stoneage?

its unbelievable that a simple task like playing clear audio isnt provided! i doubt i will buy HP again.

PLEASE provide a simple IDT driver with subwoofer support.

[Padowan]

I bought a new Envy 17 j053ea last night. Headphone sound is dreadful - heavily compressed and leads to a slowly pulsing effect in the volume during sustained loud sections as the compression comes in and out, which is pretty nauseating to listen to. Hp support tech installed the latest driver this morning and it's no better.

I really don't want to return what is otherwise an excellent machine - but this really isn't fit for purpose as far as I'm concerned. An entertainment machine sold in part on the quality of its sound system that's horrible to listen to music on? Or films, or the bits and pieces of music production I plan to use it for. Massive let down.

HP, if you've got a fix, please share it asap!

[thevybrantone]

I'm having exactly the same issue with my HP ENVY 17 laptop.

Sound is extremely hyped in the top and bottom end on headphones, and music compresses unnaturally making it pump horribly. You can disable beats Audio enhancement by pressing FN + Bon the keyboard. The flat sound loses natural mids and bottom end. I have compared the audio quality to my iPhone plus my mac system which are both flat, no eq, and the HP is simply awful. 

Really dissapointed in HP & Beats Audio.

HP customer support, is there truly a fix or simply stuck with it? If so, I want my money back this isn't good enough to do audio on.

[Padowan]

I seem to have lucked into a solution with my HP Envy 17 j130ea, so I'll share it in case it helps others:

- Background: HP tech had helped me install the latest driver, to no avail. You can probably do this yourself to be sure you're up to date.

- I disactivated the IDT device. Go to Control Panel/Hardware and Devices/Sound, select the Speakers/HP IDT device, then hit Configure.  At the bottom, there's a drop down menu for me - I changed this to "Don't use this device (disable)".  You now won't be able to play back any audio

- (At this point I expected to be able to switch it back on... I couldn't... Not really knowing what I was doing, I reinstalled the driver I'd downloaded and this didn't fix it, so if your driver is up to date you can presumably skip this stage...)

- An error flag was visible against the speakers in the notification area next to the task menu. Opened it up, Windows was able to diagnose the 'problem' that the sound card was deactivated. It reactivated it, and lo and behold, that horrific compression has disappeared. Everything now sounds spot on, after a bit of tweaking the Beats and EQ settings.

 I was pretty hacked off with this situation, and HP's inability to solve it, but having completely stumbled upon this solution so I'm so much happier with the machine. I hope this helps others!

[thevybrantone]

So it's simply a software issue really?

I tried something like what you did the other day, i disabled the driver, only unable to get it back again. I used windows to autofix the audio problem when I noticed the red x in the notifications panel and no sound was playing. It all came back, but same as it was before.

Only thing I haven't found out how to do is find the right driver update. I've run HP Support Assisant a few times now, but no updates are available. 

Do you have a link for the updated drivers, and I can try your method again? 

Cheers for the help! 🙂 

[Padowan]

It certainly seemed to be a software issue for me. I'm no expert mind, so my solution was more luck and experimentation than anything!

I found the drivers via this link - ened to look up the right ones for your machine.

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/drivers.html?jumpid=hpr_r1002_usen_link1

Good luck!

[thevybrantone]

---

@Padowan wrote:

It certainly seemed to be a software issue for me. I'm no expert mind, so my solution was more luck and experimentation than anything!

I found the drivers via this link - ened to look up the right ones for your machine.

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/drivers.html?jumpid=hpr_r1002_usen_link1

Good luck!

---

Wow, seems to have done the trick! No more horrid compression and pumping going from quite to loud sections in music. 

So I kinda followed what you did. 

I searched for my model (HP Envy 17-j141na) notebook. I'm on latest 8.1. Downloaded latest installer.

I disabled both speaker & headphone driver in control panel/sound, which then disappeared from control panel.

Installed the new audio driver. Wndows came up with a few errors on some dll files saying still in use, but I ignored and continued to install.

Restarted windows.

On restart the speaker icon in notifcation panel showed 'x' in a red circle, meaning it was disabled and no audio playing.

Right clicked and asked windows to fix problems.

Booted up iTunes and wow, sounds SO MUCH better after dropping Beats Audio EQ down to normal levels  🙂

Finally usable audio on my HP Envy 17!

Thanks so much!

Hope all this helps others. Really does concern me HP are selling laptops which are not configured correctly. My finger print scanner didn't work either, which I fixed using a similar method.

Shame. Otherwise a great laptop.

[thevybrantone]

Actually, i take it back - there still is some compression, although seemingly not as bad as before. Sounds like they raised the RMS threshold on the compressor in the software. Still getting pumping on particularly loudly mastered tracks.

Still not ideal.

Hmm