The speakers themselves I found to be quite good, but the laptop case seems to have created a kinda wide band of resonance between 350 to 500 Hz, at least when measured using the laptop’s own microphone (not the best testing setup, I’ll admit). I used the following youtube video + Audacity to record the resulting sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAsMlDptjx8
You can see the resulting “frequency response” below, and the two large peaks on the left are around 350 to 500 Hz.
For me this resonance was really painful as it made listening to speech difficult. These frequencies amplify the fundamental frequencies of the human voice, making it harder to pick out consonant and vowel sounds created by the higher pitched overtones.
For benefit of doubt, the resonance might also be exacerbated by my room, which is really echoey to begin with. Either way, I wanted to remove this resonance.
I remedied this issue on Arch Linux using Pipewire (a drop in replacement for JACK, PulseAudio, and ALSA, so you should be able to use it right away) and EasyEffects (a plugin for Pipewire)
See this wiki for more details: PipeWire - ArchWiki
Using EasyEffects I added an EQ on the output with the following settings:
4 Bands, IIR (on the right hand side)
360Hz: Q4.00, -7.72 dB
420Hz: Q4.00, -5.15 dB
450Hz: Q4.00, -4.53 dB
480Hz: Q4.00, -8.75 dB
I set this up really roughly without proper measurements. I’m sure with a better microphone and room I’d be able to get a more accurate frequency response, but this rough EQ was enough to give me a listenable setup and I’m finding podcasts / educational videos much more enjoyable to listen to again.
Has anyone else found a similar issue regarding the resonance of the laptop case? If no one else has this issue, I suppose it’s just caused by my room.