I love my new Framework laptop - love it !
I have Framework laptop and a Surface Pro 7 side-by-side.
The sound quality (listening to Rush) is so much better from the Surface than the Framework that I feel I must be missing a setting - does anyone have any ideas ?
Thanks
~GP
(Or maybe the Surface sound quality is stand-out - it blows my wife’s iPAD Pro out of the water…)
What iPad pro does she have? I got my iPad pro 2018 instead of the surface pro 7 because the speakers were so much better in a side by side comparison.
Not sure about the framework but will report back when my batch 3 is shipped.
I find if the laptop is sitting on a hard surface, the sound is very decent.
However, if you have the laptop sitting on your… lap, or on any kind of soft surface, the sound is very muffled and bass heavy. like it’s inside a bag or something.
This is most likely from the downward firing speakers, and without a hard surface to reflect the sound back upwards towards you, just sounds off.
Are you using speakers or head phones, personally I was surprised how good the headphone audio sounds and how well it drives headphones compared to most windows machines. The speakers however, are good, but not did blow me away.
I know it’s an old topic, but for those who gonna look for that in the future:
Most issues with audio fidelity can be solved with proper equalizer. On Linux there is great app called PullseEffects (if you are using Pullse Audio), on Windows it is kinda hard to find proper one. My last laptop had certified Dolby sound and there was nice app called just Dolby Theater, but I doubt it will work on Frame.work.
However, equalizer must be set correctly to sound good, and for EVERY model of headphones will be different profile, that’s why manufacturers don’t bother with setting it by default. That should be done for built in speakers though, but that would require custom driver and we are all running the default ones, but I think they did some processing in hardware for built in speakers.
Sound quality is mainly defined by the frequency response of the transducers and in the case of speakers also directivity and room reflections.
There are different approaches to analyzing sound quality, but accurate measurements require equipment that is on the more expensive side of things (multiple 10.000$ worth).
For Windows there is a software combination that consists of EqualizerAPO and PeaceUI which offers quite extensive sound configuration. Important to note though is that for accurate EQ settings there needs to be some kind of standard to test against. This has to do with how the brain adjusts to sound signatures that are repeated (similar to smells and visual cues). There are measurement databases for headphones and speakers though as well as (relatively) well-established target frequency responses.
I don’t recommend going into this rabbit hole unless you are utterly obsessed with sound quality.
For simpler things to play around with FxSound has recently shifted to being completely free:
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