Audio Card Madness

[Dead Guy]

I got a new laptop at work yesterday. It's a slightly modified Dell Latitude E6400.

So I plug my small speakers in and fire up Spotify, and this really weird property of the sound starts to annoy me tremendously. It's like the volume is compensated somehow, it really destroys the sound image so to speak. Sort of lowering the volume of all frequencies when a loud high frequency sound is played, but I'm not audiophile enough to pinpoint it exactly. Maybe it's just that frequency being altered, the volume varying is extremely annoying regardless.

I start looking through the control panel in Win 7, find something called IDT Audio with some SRS sliders etc. The device is called IDT High def audio codec. Anyone got any idea what I'm looking for to remove this crappy effect?

Cheers
/DG

PS
As an added bonus, whenever I press pause in spotify the sound dies until I close spotify. Even if I press play again. Epic weirdness.

 

[Leon]

Sounds like normalization. I'm not familiar with IDT, but look for a "normalization" or "loudness equalization"-looking option in your audio device driver control panel.

Try updating your drivers as well; could fix that issue with Spotify.

 

[Dead Guy]

The sliders I have are TruBass, Definition, Center, Space and Focus. The description of Focus is "Raises the experienced volume from the speakers to the listeners level". Whatever that means.

Put the focus to 0% and raised the definition a bit to compensate for the loss of treble. I think it might be gone. Thanks for the advice.

 

[Leon]

Glad to hear that's fixed. What about your issue with Spotify?

 

[Dead Guy]

Not so much luck with that. I haven't taken the time to search more intensely than visiting IDT's site in search of drivers, seems they don't have any. So the sound still disappears at random when I pause, happens both in media player and spotify. Comes back if I close down the application and restart it. Weirdness.