Asus Vivobook 15 has horrific audio

toobladink · February 13, 2020

My friend recently picked up a refurbished laptop online and the audio is horrible. Bluetooth headphones, wired headphones, and the speakers all sound terrible. I understand the speakers aren't great, and they're never used, but the rest is worrying. Let me describe the audio quality a little bit -

No headphones are able to reproduce low frequencies. Everything else sounds washed out and not as crisp. For example, a snare won't sound as crisp or instantaneous.

Other than reinstalling drivers, what else can I check? Is there a way to see if perhaps it's a hardware problem and if there is a way to fix it?

Warranty is out of the question, unfortunately.

Roswell · February 14, 2020

Bluetooth sounds the same whether it's on a Chromebook or a $5,000 notebook unless it's using an ancient form of the standard.

So it's either placebo or a Windows configuration issue. I'd start with making sure the OS install is fresh and not carried over from the previous user.

toobladink · February 28, 2020

Turns out actually bluetooth works fine - likely that analog output is trashed on the sound card or whatever processes sound. Currently have no idea what could cause this, my thoughts are maybe a cap blew so the lower frequencies are being accidentally filtered out. But that's so vague - there are plenty of electrical components that could fail, and I shouldn't really say that since so many fundamental filters are just a handful of components.

Bluetooth sounded the same because I think there weren't any up to date drivers or something. We never tested bluetooth after doing a bunch of stuff to the system so it's hard to say what fixed it. Using bluetooth will be fine, for now