[devilbear]

I honestly don't know what to call it; Beats isn't a music player, it's something HP has put on my system that refuses to be removed and takes the place of the Realtek Audio Manager which usually comes bundled with Realtek drivers. Even completely uninstalling it and installing vanilla Realtek drivers brought it back, and it affects all sounds system-wide. So that's why I assumed it was part of the drivers, where I suppose it's more something packaged with them that HP has a method of reinstalling without my permission. Using any player from WMP to VLC didn't seem to counter the annoying effects, sadly, and couldn't do anything for the non-music media.

However! After a ton of google searching and realizing while attempting to listen to a binaural video, I was able to figure out that the left and right audio channels were being mixed into mono. From there, I found out that it's because the Beats program sets up SRS effects in the registry that it doesn't allow an interface to change. For some unknown reason, channel mixing is among those effects (eew).

I found the registry alterations necessary to turn the horrible channel mixing and volume leveling off... and still reap the benefits of having a bit of a bass boost per my settings in the equalizer. So thankfully that nightmare of frustration is over and now I don't have to put up with the default Windows drivers any longer.

Thanks for responding! It did turn out it wasn't actually drivers at all, but sadly wasn't as simple as just swapping programs. Shame on HP for making things so difficult and intentionally setting audio to sound like it's mono!

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Glad you got it sorted and thanks for sharing how you resolved the issue 

 

Sad fact is that with brand name computers always comes the risk of of bundled bloatware, Beats has apparently been a known problem for HP for years but they seem to have done little or nothing to address it, one such thread with many different complaints here it looks to me like it is pretty much useless unless you have a powered speaker system.

[phillpower2]

Glad you got it sorted and thanks for sharing how you resolved the issue 

 

Sad fact is that with brand name computers always comes the risk of of bundled bloatware, Beats has apparently been a known problem for HP for years but they seem to have done little or nothing to address it, one such thread with many different complaints here it looks to me like it is pretty much useless unless you have a powered speaker system.