I didn't know this album was recorded in a tin can!

January 8, 2010 5:15 PM

My new laptop has terrible speakers. Please help me make it better, or make the best of a bad situation.

I just got a new laptop - a Toshiba Satellite L510. I'm pretty happy with it - it's much better than my last laptop.

But there's a problem: the speakers are terrible. Everything sounds tinny and cheap. I've been playing around with the Realtek HD Audio Manager settings, where you can select different things for environment (like living room, auditorium, carpeted hallway, etc.) and also for equalizer (pop, club, rock, jazz, etc.) So far, none of the combinations I've tried have made much of a difference. I use my laptop a lot, and often use it just to listen to music, and now when I try to listen to anything, I usually get through one song and then just turn it off.

Is there any way to make this better? Can I change anything to make it more bearable? Or am I going to have to learn how to live with it?

Thank you for any/all suggestions.

posted by gursky to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I think that's just a result of the speakers being small enough to fit into a laptop case, and I doubt there's a software solution. Does it have a headphone jack? You could use headphones, or plug some better speakers into it for when you don't need it to be portable.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 3:32 AM on January 9, 2010

My answer to this was lost in the database snafu, but in summary, it said: No, there's nothing you can do. Your best option is plug in headphones or external speakers.
posted by Mwongozi at 4:30 AM on January 9, 2010

The speakers are tiny and cheap, and there's not much you can do to make them sound better. Use headphones, or buy external speakers. It's far easier to manufacture tolerable, cheap headphones than tolerable, cheap speakers. Good cheap headphones include the Sennheiser PX100, Sennheiser CX300, Sennehiser HD201, and the Koss KSC75.
posted by paulg at 5:07 AM on January 9, 2010

Pretty much all laptop speakers are rubbish, IMO. Either go the headphone route (I'd recommend a pair of Grados; even their entry-level model sounds amazing) or get some external speakers. I've using Logitech V20s for a good year and a half and they're just amazing. They run off a usb port and you can get some pretty decent volume out of them. Plus I reckon they'd have come down in price a lot by now.
posted by mandrake at 1:08 AM on January 10, 2010