My company just bought me a brand new Toshiba laptop. I was surprised (and pleased) when I took it out of the box to find that it had a built-in harman/kardon sound system, or at least harman/kardon speakers.
Much to my amazement when I fired it up and tried to play one of my CD’s it sounded just as lousy as all of my previous laptops had (all highs and mids and no lows). And there was no tone control that I could find.
Perhaps it was a tad better than my other laptops, but the real question is why do all of those tiny speakers used in laptops have such little or no bass? Isn’t there some way to electronically simulate bass or do you just need bigger speakers to have any real bass sound? Come to think of it, using my headphones everything sounds fine, and those are small speakers (although they are very close to my ears). So what gives?
Also, for decent stereo sound, the speakers have to be a fair distance apart, like 4-5 feet. Of course, the speakers on your laptop are much closer than that, so any stereo effects in the sound are pretty much lost.
My Compaq Presario 2135us has the best laptop speakers I’ve ever heard. They’re comparable to a set of 6-dollar economy computer speakers, which is pretty good for a laptop…
They sound just great, even compared to the perfect sound on my desktop.
I hope a speaker expert corrects me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t it
have a lot to do with the density of the enclosure (wood or heavy
plastic) and the air space inside that assists the resonation? I’m
looking at the transparent softball sized speakers that came with
my imac–the actual "speaker part is the size of a… uh, [searches
around house] the top of a salt-shaker [?] most of which I imagine
is the heavy magnet. The rest of the enclosure is empty. My guess–
1-no room in the laptop for empty air space
2-no room for thick plastic enclosure for resonance
3-danger of using heavy magnets near delicate laptop innards
Every program I have ever used to play music on computers came with a tone control slider. Of course, it’s just a way to make all ranges equally muddy, but at least no range is horribly muddy.
All in all, the speakers are just there so you can hear things you’d “need” to hear, like system sounds, voices in presentations, etc. It’s not supposed to be a portable entertainment system.
3 isn’t really an issue. There isn’t anything delicate inside of a laptop that would be affected by a magnet. I suspect that even if you put the hard drive right next to the speaker it wouldn’t matter much. 1 and 2 definately apply though.
It’s basically the answer that guys don’t want to hear. Size matters.
Power consumption would make a much better #3 for your list. Speakers of any decent size and capable of any reasonable volume will suck down battery power, and power is one of the critical performance issues in a laptop.
Toshiba put out a laptop with a dedicated sub-woofer. It was apparently miles above any other laptop. Which put it about the $20 Desktop speaker range.
Toshiba put out a laptop with a dedicated sub-woofer. It was apparently miles above any other laptop. Which put it about the $20 Desktop speaker range.
