I’m coming up on my one year anniversary of being a FW16 user, I absolutely love my machine and have almost no complaints considering my expectations of this being a new product, small company, and niche platform.
Now that I’ve broken in the laptop I’m thinking about things I would change (as that was the spirit of paying the premium for a servicable machine). The first one that comes to mind after a year of heavy use is the sound. It’s servicable but very sub par.
I’m curious if anyone has looked into doing something like 3d printing a drop in enclosure for a better driver? Or are the physical speakers okay and the audio card is just not adequate? Are the speakers not being fed enough juice in an effort to preserve battery? I’m not an audio person at all so this is unfamiliar territory as far as the terminology goes, but surely I’m not the first to think about modding the speakers!
OS?
Have you loaded any audio tweaks? Equalizers and / or audio effects profiles made for laptops. They need it. It provides a good improvement. Laptop speakers are always lacking. Some laptops are able to apply audio profiles in hardware, so it’s just built-in. Apple I believe does that for one.
Several profiles are available in this thread, for Linux at least
Some profiles provide an improvement on most laptops, and aren’t specifically tuned to Framework.
I might have been editing my post while you were posting.
Some profiles provide an improvement on most laptops, and aren’t specifically tuned to Framework. But I imgine there are ones tuned for the FWL16 as well by now.
The bios setting audio fix, iirc is just something to do with better Linux compatibility, regarding… something or other. Don’t recall. Except it’s not a EQ profile or audio effects.
Have you loaded up the small realtek program installed with the original audio drivers? Just fiddling a little with the EQ (more bass, less mid around 4k, more treble) makes the sound so much better, better than e.g. the xps17. Don’t know how it compares to MacBooks. I don’t really understand what the expectation is, and what the wish of good sound is compared to? But yes, I also believe there’s a bit of headroom to drive more power through the speakers to make them louder without introducing distortion.
Sure Not perfect, and based on my limited audio knowledge, but this preset allows for more bass, in the range that can be replicated by the speakers, lower frequencies cannot be heard since the drivers are too small, and/or the sound could get muddy because the higher frequency band then needs to share some headroom with the lower frequencies, giving it lesser impact. As for the mid freq, i tuned it down to feel more balanced and to give the lower frequencies more space, especially when turning up the volume. Finally, I turned the trebles up as the drivers are not impacted much by the small vibrations and can replicate these frequencies reliably until maybe 14-16khz or so, together with the rest of the spectrum. just to give it some extra crispiness, YMMV.
Always open for suggestions/corrections to my knowledge!
In all, you always want to balance your equalizer so you don’t add more sound, e.g. everything set above 0, you always want to subtract sound, in order to avoid distortion/damaging speakers and keep the dynamic differences (silent vs loud parts) in audio playback. But then also not only subtract since you then get lesser volume, of course hope it makes sense, cheers
I’ll second this, I also use Brian’s equalizer and the difference in (subjective) audio quality is night and day. With his tweaks it’s the best sounding laptop I’ve heard, spare perhaps the macbook pro.
I would highly recommend giving it a try before any future upgrades.
@Lasse As I’m running on linux, there are no drivers in the same way as there would be on windows, but I’m definitely not looking for pro-audio, I’d just like it not to be clipping over 50% volume lol
@TechPriestNhyk@Kiwi I have installed EasyEffects and loaded a few profiles to try them out and I’m still hearing bad distortion once the speakers get over around 50%, that’s why I was thinking maybe driver upgrades or some sort of tiny audio driver would need to be the solution
@Igor_Polyakov1 I have both actually, but sometimes I just want to watch a youtube video away from my better audio equipment without it sounding like someones blasting the audio from a bathroom down the hall
Not perfect, and based on my limited audio knowledge, but this preset allows for more bass, in the range that can be replicated by the speakers, lower frequencies cannot be heard since the drivers are too small, and/or the sound could get muddy because the higher frequency band then needs to share some headroom with the lower frequencies, giving it lesser impact. As for the mid freq, i tuned it down to feel more balanced and to give the lower frequencies more space, especially when turning up the volume. Finally, I turned the trebles up as the drivers are not impacted much by the small vibrations and can replicate these frequencies reliably until maybe 14-16khz or so, together with the rest of the spectrum. just to give it some extra crispiness, YMMV.
hope it makes sense, cheers
