Author Topic: Because Laptop Speakers Suck...  (Read 859 times)

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Online roamer_1

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Because Laptop Speakers Suck...
« on: June 13, 2021, 05:39:14 pm »
This is dumb... But I thought I would jot it down for posterity's sake, to maybe save y'all a little heartache.

The whole thing starts from the premise that laptop speakers suck. Well, that is not the premise, that is actually a fact. My Droid phone seriously has better play than my laptop speakers, and I mean that truly. The premise would actually be the 'doing something' about it.

Now, I already have headphones. And earbuds. The thing is, sitting here at Command Central, I already have my reading glasses around my neck, a bluetooth mic/earbud for my Droid hanging around my neck, and a plantronix phone headset for the landlines hanging on my neck too, and my thumb lanyard where I keep all my magic tricks, not unlike a native American's medicine pouch.

Probably the biggest annoyance in my computer lab life is the giant monkey knot of cords I am continually setting right... I mean, every time I reach down to put on my glasses, they invariably go on with an earbud twizzled around the right handle, if not over the bridge, with an earbud hanging down bumping the side of my nose.

It really is about that monkey-knot, and steps I am taking to free myself from that collar of cords choking my freedom, but that starts inevitably with the least necessary evil. And laptop speakers suck.

And here I am, all these years, doing the very same thing all the time, and knowing it is going to cheese me off every hour.... When a perfectly good solution has been there for many many years - Nearly all the way along.

Bluetooth. No really. ALL this time, and I am one 15 dollar dual band mini PCIe card and maybe 40 bucks for a not-quite-crappy bluetooth speaker away from eliminating one of those cursed wires from off my neck.

Really the end game goes further than that, because with bluetooth I can operate my cell through my PC using the My Phone app, so I can shed my blue tooth mic/earbuds for my cell too... and don a mic/headset for the pooter instead, which seems to be breaking even... but if I can likewise pump my landlines through a modem into the pooter, I lose the plantronix too... Than means trading three (the laptop headset, the cell mic/earbuds, and the plantronix) for one (hopefully wireless) headset for the pooter. Which is worthy beyond all measure.

But it started at the laptop, because laptop speakers suck.

So I figger I ain't no fool. It seems an easy thing... Buy a dual band ac/bluetooth wiffy card, stick it in there, and away we go. But I know better off the get-go. I run HPs and I know they have a whitelist in their BIOS, and if the new hardware is not on that whitelist, it will crap out on boot because the bios will nix it.

So I did the work. I researched white papers for the right card... really two, as I have two laptops, and I wanted one solution for them both. I settled on an Intel AC 7260 ... It is an older card, tried and true, even though it is out of production, but it is still very available as a new part. And it is guaranteed to work with both my pavillion and my elitebook.

So off I go to ebay and get those coming.

Now, while the eventuality is to run everything through my desktop speakers, in the interim, I went looking for a not-quite-crappy bluetooth speaker - with the intention that it would be useful to me after the fact as a portable speaker to use out in the shop, or if I went out camping and such. At the least it could live on my endtable by my Lazy boy and serve my laptop when it is there..

I am novice in this realm, but I already have a little softball sized speaker I use with my Droid tablet, so I am not wholly ignorant. I wanted somewhat better than that... Something capable of good 'nuff sound and volume to be a decent computer speaker and capable of playing music. Nothing fancy, but sufficient.

This was a crazy thing. There are so many choices - literally hundreds... And not being AV/Sound oriented I have no idea. Finally settled on an Aomais Sport II speaker... And got that coming.

Finally the day came. I order a lot of stuff on EBay and Amazon, but finally all the parts came in.

I started with my main laptop. Took out the native N wifi card, and slipped it the AC... WOW. Way better file transfer over wifi locally. Anyone moving files over their network... N vs AC... AC is worth it. Way better.

But the bluetooth ain't working. Eight hours later, after many iterations, it still ain't working. So I walk away for a while... Figger I will work on the pavillion instead. So I complete the minor surgery... And get bonked by the whitelist in BIOS - Which is not supposed to happen with the card I chose. So I swapped it with the card in the elitebook, figgering the bad card had not been flashed for HP. NOPE. That card is not on the whitelist, regardless of what reams of white papers say.

Alright. This is getting stupid. I did NOT want a bluetooth USB dongle because my Pavillion particularly lives in a case and I know how easy it is to snag a dongle and wreck a machine - I see that a lot across my bench.

But I am exasperated, and sick of it... So I run up over to the Best Buy and grab the smallest Bluetooth dongle I can find.... Plug her in and...

It works. I mean it just works. Right away. Plug it in and go. Sheesh. How amazing is that at this point? Twenty bucks, immediate local gratification, boom, done.

So I fire up that speaker... And I am mildly disappointed sommore. For all the effort, that speaker does what I wanted. Pretty good sound... and enough volume for a computer speaker... But for playing music? meh. Fine for a mid-volume background sound... but it is nothing much.

*SIGH*

So it kinda worked out.
There is a moral to the story here...

For sure, if you want to retrofit bluetooth, the only real and painless solution is to put up with a dongle.
And not-quite-crappy bluetooth speakers are just that.

Oh, and operating my phone through the computer?? the secondary, but more important mission? It dorks up the MyPhone app. It works. I can run the phone through the computer... but the VM that shows the phone on the pooter and allows you to operate it died when the bluetooth turned on. So I can have phone calls, messages, and notifications and nothing else, or I can get rid of the bluetooth and have everything except phone calls.

go figger.  *****rollingeyes*****

Online Smokin Joe

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Re: Because Laptop Speakers Suck...
« Reply #1 on: June 14, 2021, 08:42:21 am »
All I did was get the sound bar off a teevee a friend had scrounged, gratis, and I have better sound than these old ears can appreciate.
How God must weep at humans' folly! Stand fast! God knows what he is doing!
Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C S Lewis