Thinkpads Forum

I have to listen to and watch a lot of videos online on my T410 that are not professionally made. As such, they do not have normalized or leveled sound. You would think this would be a semi-common task for business users, and lenovo as such would realize that even as business users SOMETIMES WE NEED EXTRA VOLUME. I have turned up every volume control I can find, and it is still almost impossible to hear in a slightly noisy environment. The speakers are quiet, fine, whatever, but the headphone jack is incredibly quiet too! I simply cannot make this stuff listenable!

Seems like a pretty big oversight for a BUSINESS MACHINE that I can't get decent sound volume to watch quiet recordings or live broadcasts. Other laptops (even business laptops!!) get up to 3-5x as loud. What was lenovo thinking? The difference isn't even small, it's a huge, staggering volume limitation on this machine.

Is there any way to get windows to go to 200% volume or something? It still won't be distorting that way because the recording is just very very quiet!

Use the VLC player and you can distort the sound all you want to.

Or get SRS Audio Sandbox (which was my attempt to solve the quiet sound on the T400) and use that to jam up the volume. My T400 had frustratingly quiet sound too. They're supposed to have doubled the output power on the new generation.

Harryc wrote:Use the VLC player and you can distort the sound all you want to.

I can't use VLC to watch these videos. They are delivered through silverlight, I think.

Colonel O'Neill wrote:Or get SRS Audio Sandbox (which was my attempt to solve the quiet sound on the T400) and use that to jam up the volume. My T400 had frustratingly quiet sound too. They're supposed to have doubled the output power on the new generation.

I just got a new T410 and it's really quiet. And this is supposed to be a top-of-the-line machine worth extra $$$? My first impression of Lenovo Thinkpads is pretty poor.

The built-in speakers on Thinkpads were never supposed to be good or loud. Every time I want to watch a movie or listen to anything more than casual, I plug in external speakers.

Did anyone tried to replace built-in speakers with something better? (or make other hardware modification that would allow internal speakers to be louder?).

Low sound volume even on all sliders maxed out it a nightmare.

Obviously, I don't know specifically what you are trying to listen to, but I find the speakers quite adequate... for a laptop.

Do you have an example (link) that you can share for us to try?

Everything is silent, mp3, youtube, OS sounds, all on maxed sliders, so it doesn't simply matter what I'm listening. It's some problem or limitation of the hardware itself.

If you google for the problems you will find many entries about thinkpad low volume audio problems (and no solutions) ;/

Maybe try uninstalling and reinstalling the Conexant drivers.

This is Linux (but on the Windows the problem was the same). It's NOT matter of software.

Well then does it work better under Windows?

No.

dr_st wrote:The built-in speakers on Thinkpads were never supposed to be good or loud. Every time I want to watch a movie or listen to anything more than casual, I plug in external speakers.

But it's the same with headphones. There's no reason why these should both be so quiet.

You might need to disable the headphone limiter in SmartAudio.

Colonel O'Neill wrote:You might need to disable the headphone limiter in SmartAudio.

I'd never heard of SmartAudio before.

That makes the headphones a little louder, but there's still not enough gain.

Hey try Daum Potplayer. There is a option where you can increase the master volume and other options such as EQ etc. I prefer it over VLC & Gom Player and there is a x64 version .

Colonel O'Neill wrote:You might need to disable the headphone limiter in SmartAudio.

On my T410 I could never find this feature despite having the latest Smartaudio driver, and tonight I found out why. If the T410 is docked (I never actually use headphones while undocked), and you are using the audio out port on the dock, Smartaudio automatically applies the headphone limiter with no option to disable it. I simply took the audio cable and plugged it directly into the T410...voila, the limiter dialog popped right up when I clicked on the headphone in Smartaudio. I dIsabled it and I'd estimate volume output into my external AMP is now 25% greater. Normal I'd say.

Hi there! Resolved with films: just installed the windows media classic player and set the audio amplifing during the watching. and voila!

audio track->options->audioswitching->amplifing switch to max