Submitted by jimmysofat6864 t3_11emt79 in headphones
Got a newer laptop and the audio jack sounded like complete trash. Made Etymotics sound all closed in and just sounded wrong. I turned off audio enhancements in the Windows Settings and in the control panel and it still sounded like trash. Turns out on some laptops Dolby Access can still mess with the audio on your system even if you uninstall it from your system. I had to reinstall dolby access from the Microsoft Store, go into another settings menu and select "disable all speaker and headphone effects" then it finally sounded normal.
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Anyways just wanted to share that because I spent a good while wondering why my audio sounded horrible. I thought it was me but then I plugged into my MacBook and it sounded normal. Odd that dolby audio can still screw with the audio even though I had uninstalled it. It's an even bigger pain than my old laptop but at least on that you could disable waves maxxaudio outright and never deal with it again.
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Photos for reference on what to disable if you are curious. Won't cover all systems as I know Dell PC's have Waves Maxxaudio and that has it's own setting.
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BehindThyCamel t1_jaf034i wrote
That config setting is crucial. My work laptop had the center channel panned quite a bit to the left until I checked that option. No idea what they thought they were achieving with this feature but it's garbage.