[devilbear]

My laptop is a "HP Pavilion 17-F042NR 17.3" Laptop, AMD A10-5745M Quad-Core 2.1GHz, 8GB DDR3, 1TB SATA" running on Windows 8.1 64-bit, in case that matters for helping me out. It's new to me, but is a refurb; I've only had it for two days and want to see if I can fix the deal breaker issues I'm having without sending it back since I desperately need a new computer anyway.

First issue: the monitor quality seems terrible. All images, even those built into the Operating System, look like indexed .gif or heavily compressed .jpg files and colours don't seem to blend right together. For example, even on a bucket-filled area of pure colour allows me to clearly see the vertical rows of pixels which comprise the screen so that it doesn't look like a solid area. Obviously, this is highly annoying and not at all acceptable. Worse, the Catalyst Control Center only offers settings such as hue, contrast, etc. which do nothing to control this issue. The Catalyst Controls on my seven-year-old Pavilion dv7z are more fully featured and the screen displays nicer.

I'd like to try updating my graphics drivers in hopes of gaining a better Catalyst featureset and fixing the graphical issues, but according to the version numbers, what I've got installed is already the latest version fom HP. Should I try installing the same version again in case it's somehow corrupted?

 

Speaking of that old laptop, by the way, its audio is superior and audio controls in the drivers far more complete. This new laptop has terrible sound quality, and I want to get rid of the volume clipping/limiting/whatever and annoying Beats Audio equalizer. Hence, issue two.

 

Right now, it has a Beats-packaged RealTek driver. The audio sounds horrible under any settings, and turning off Beats produces sound so subpar it's like listening to a cheap pair of headphones while there's a ton of ambient noise. In fact, it's so imbalanced when I turn off Beatd Audio that instead of enhancing the bass as they do with literally any other device, my headphones barely manage to produce flat-sounding audio when attached to this computer. (Speaking of, instead of recognizing the audio jack and reacting to headphones being plugged in properly, it makes the sound louder through headphones than the speakers. I found this out the painful way.)

 

What I'd love to do is completely abolish the current drivers and install a non-Beats variety of the RealTek drivers. Is this possible? If so, how and where to I find them? And how do I uninstall the old drivers to install the new ones? I need to preserve the ability to use Stereo Mix and the function buttons on my keyboard which control volume; I know that simply letting default drivers take over can destroy both of these things.

 

I hope you guys (and/or gals) can help, and thanks in advance just for reading all of this.

 

Edited: I was able to follow the instructions here to enable the default Windows drivers, but that led to my headphones and speakers not being swapped out automatically. Googling led me to the realization that Windows' default drivers aren't equipped to handle that... and then led me to the RealTek drivers site. I downloaded the 64-bit version for Windows 8.1 from here and installed it. Though I had to manually show and enable Stereo Mix, I have it back.

 

The downside: My speakers and headphones are not recognized as separate entities. They do swap out automatically and no longer have the 'headphones are three times as loud' issue, so I can live with this if I must, but it feels wrong and leaves me worrying if I ever choose to use a headset it won't work. I also don't have an 'enhancement' tab in the device properties for my speakers. I've googled about that and can't come up with a solid answer one way or the other as to whether it's supposed to be there or not with modern RealTek drivers.

 

What I do still have the most concern about, however, is audio limiting and leveling, neither of which I want. Since there's no 'enhancement' tab and the 'advanced' tab is basically a joke, there's no way for me to be certain these features didn't linger from the stock drivers with Beats Audio enabled. I listened to a video on youtube I'm super familiar with, and when the song's supposed to build up and get louder... it left me underwhelmed and didn't get louder at all, and the perceived volume keeps fluctuating in nasty ways. I'm about at my wit's end with this mess! Someone please help. Lead me to the registry keys to disable the godawful limiting and leveling that's apparently left over from the Beats Audio inclusive drivers (it's the RealTek version; sadly the only thing google turned up was the registry entries for the IDT version), please. I can't deal with this nastiness.

 

Another edit: Turns out I'd disabled the realtek audio manager in startup during other attempts to get rid of Beats. After re-enabling the manager, Beats is back! I'm tempted to uninstall the program from my start screen and see what happens, at this point; apparently a lot of the problem here is that the bleeping thing is overwriting the real Realtek Audio Manager. And apparently it's not part of the driver installation, or the vanilla RealTek drivers would have overwritten it. What the...?! I just want the Beats Audio gone and a real, genuine RealTek driver and RealTek Audio Manager. This should not be so bleeding difficult! Someone help, please? I couldn't find anywhere to download the real RealTek Audio Manager.

Edited by devilbear, 12 February 2015 - 10:53 PM.

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Hello devilbear,

 

Try the following steps;

 

Create a new folder on the desktop, call it Realtek HD Audio drivers.

Download the audio drivers from here  (use the select OS and then the submit tab, you will see two lots of Realtek HD Audio drivers included in the list) save one of them in the folder that you just created.

Create a new restore point.

Uninstall the present audio drivers.

Restart the computer in Safe Mode.

Install the newly saved drivers then test in both safe mode and after a restart.

 

Let us know how it goes.

[phillpower2]

Hello devilbear,

 

Try the following steps;

 

Create a new folder on the desktop, call it Realtek HD Audio drivers.

Download the audio drivers from here  (use the select OS and then the submit tab, you will see two lots of Realtek HD Audio drivers included in the list) save one of them in the folder that you just created.

Create a new restore point.

Uninstall the present audio drivers.

Restart the computer in Safe Mode.

Install the newly saved drivers then test in both safe mode and after a restart.

 

Let us know how it goes.

[devilbear]

Hi phillpower2, and thanks! Before I get started, I have my system using the default Windows drivers. For this to work and the uninstall to take effect, do I need to switch back to the Beats Audio drivers so that those will be uninstalled during the process?

(Also, just as a point of concern, my system shipped with Beats Audio, so I have a funny feeling that installing the drivers from HP won't get rid of it.)

Edited by devilbear, 15 February 2015 - 01:11 PM.

[phillpower2]

You only need to uninstall the Beats Audio drivers then follow the steps that I suggested   

[devilbear]

Shiny. Can you tell me how to uninstall drivers that aren't currently active? I'm afraid I only know how to swap/uninstall the active ones, as drivers aren't usually something I need to bother with and Windows 8.1 is a little confusing sometimes on top of that.

[phillpower2]

Go into the Device Manager, click on the Sound, video and game controllers tab, make a note of what is listed there then post the info here for us.

[devilbear]

I have:

 

• AMD High Definition Audio Device  (from what I can tell, this is the driver for my HDMI port)
• CyberLink WebCam Virtual Driver
• High Definition Audio Device (this is the Windows default drivers I switched to)

[phillpower2]

None of those apply so can you go into Control Panel > Programs and Features >  Uninstall a program > let us know if there is any audio related software listed.

[devilbear]

RealTek High Definition Audio Driver is listed. This'll be the one with Beats Audio, I believe, as that's what it was listed as when I swapped drivers from that to the WIndows default.

[phillpower2]

Not being familiar with Beats Audio I cannot say that it is the one I'm afraid + keep in mind that Beats Audio may be included in the latest Realtek HP specific drivers for your computer, check the version numbers and release date/s to see if they correspond to the problematic drivers that you have already tried.

[devilbear]

From what I've observed, the Beats Audio panel is basically just a really annoying (to me) equalizer, the settings (non-changeable) for which leave volume levelling on even when you disable the equalizer. It hijacks/ takes the place of the real RealTek High Definition Audio Manager (or whatever it's called similar to that), the one I want installed, by running as the same program/process. Even when I used a vanilla Realtek driver installer (from the realtek site), and it did the uninstall and reinstall itself, I was left with the annoying Beats Audio version instead of the Realtek Audio Manager. I don't know if it's because I used standard methods or what. I do have a .exe installer for generic Realtek drivers, if you think maybe that'd help with the safemode process? But somehow, this thing was able to overwrite the generic drivers to include the Beats Audio manager. :/

 

I imagine the Beats Audio is, frustratingly enough, included with the HP version as this laptop has the beats logo on the speaker grille and whatnot. I could go on a pages-long rant about how uncool it is to force a less-featured control panel, volume levelling, and an equalizer that can't be properly zeroed and yet advertise the computers in a manner which makes you believe Beats is just the brand of the speakers (since it's also a headphones brand), but that wouldn't get us anywhere so. xD

[phillpower2]

The Beats brand of headphones I am familiar with and not particularly impressed with so enough said 

 

With OEM computer such as HP and Dell etc it is best to download the drivers from them, if you do end up landed with Beats audio again try ditching it and using an alternative alongside Windows audio drivers, RealPlayer (free) is one such example see here

[devilbear]

Unfortunately, most of my audio usage is actually associated with video games, Netflix/Amazon Prime, and YouTube, so I don't think it'd be fixable with RealPlayer.

 

To be honest, I'm completely willing to risk losing speaker functionality from any extra speakers (if there even are any) since I already have by swapping to the WIndows drivers. It's a complete, system-wide forced and un-alterable volume levelling with the Beats Audio control panel, and I'm sadly a bit neurotic when it comes to that as volume levelling triggers panic attacks and the auditory equivalent of claustrophobia. So given the circumstances, I don't mind a little trouble if I could get the real Realtek Audio Manager installed by not using HP's version of the drivers.

 

I'm actually not sure if I'm explaining it well, but say you listen to Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight" on any other device. When it reaches a certain point, the drums swell and the song gets louder and epic. Even with the equalizer portion (the only portion you can turn off) disabled in Beats Audio, if I'm using HP's version of the drivers I have forced volume levelling. Where the song normally would get louder and epic, it throttles the volume and it sounds as if you've suddenly thrown earmuffs on. Very unpleasant and complete ruination of audio quality. It seems to be something on a system-wide level, without a visible option to disable it. An article I found on the internet explained that some-- okay I'll be nice and not call people I don't know names --someone thought it'd be a bright idea to have the Beats Audio attempt to overtax the speakers' abilities to produce bass etc. So the levelling is forced to prevent it from blowing out speakers easily. Unfortunately, it doesn't disable when you turn off the equalizer. Those with the IDT version, where HP wasn't able to hide the built-in driver control panel, have even proven that disabling Beats resets the bass to -12 in the system. Trust me; it shows!

 

So, basically, I really really want to be rid of it completely no matter what I have to do, but I don't like that the Windows drivers make swapping between headphones and speakers cumbersome and rob me of the Stereo Mix recording option.

Edited by devilbear, 15 February 2015 - 05:16 PM.

[devilbear]

Eugh, I definitely need to get rid of the WIndows generic drivers. I can't even swap between speakers and headphones when watching a dvd! I had to fiddle with the playback devices, which resulted in the volume getting stuck for headphones and me having to restart. Obviously, there went the movie-watching experience!

 

If it helps any, and oh do I ever hope it does because I'm about to the point of hating this stupid, new laptop and the fact I can't just return it for the annoyance that it is, the Beats Audio program seems to be installed as "C:\Program Files\Realtek\Audio\HDA\RtkNGUI64.exe" which Google says should actualy be the Realtek Audio Manager. I tried at one point actually deleting the folder it's in (after saving a backup of course) and that was when I installed the generic drivers from Realtek. No dice. It brought Beats back as the audio manager as if I'd never removed it at all.

 

Please tell me this isn't it-- that HP hasn't done some foolery to make sure that the Realtek Audio Manager is always and forever overwritten as Beats Audio control panel.

 

I haven't tried anything in safe mode yet, and in fact don't currently know how to reach safe mode in Windows 8.1, but this really is making me wish I could just throw away this whole machine. That's how problematic it is to me.

[phillpower2]

In case you are not aware audio drivers and Beats are two separate things as in it is Beats that is causing you grief and not the audio drivers, get rid of Beats and try VLC (free) which you can download from here

 

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