DELL 7373 SPEAKER PROBLEM

There is an Audio FAQ you might look through.  Luckily, I have not encountered anything but some sporadic distortion.

All I might suggest is to look at all the volume controls involved and see if any are show high levels.

If you have a Bluetooth headset or a USB type headset you might try those to see if the problem occurs there also.  

If you are running any third party audio software or if Chrome is involved, you might make that known.

As far as the Bluetooth goes, my 9365 system (and one other) has system notification sounds which are delayed by 2 to 3 seconds.  They are not delayed when using Bluetooth...  

Jim should be by shortly to help.

Jim should be by shortly to help.

Thanks a lot!

The problem with noise issues is that there are so many possible causes. A summary of Dell laptop audio noise issues:

We really didn't have too much noise problems back in XP, partly because up through XP audio had pretty high priority. Things got worse starting with Vista, which changed the way audio was handled.

I wrote the Choppy/Skipping Audio FAQ to chronicle the issues that started around that time. Eventually it seemed that the problems mostly were resolved during Windows 7 and for a few years we had a break. Then about the time Windows 10 came out and Dell started putting Realtek audio on the motherboards, noise started to become an issue again. There were other issues besides just noise at that time so I started a new faq called Recent Issues FAQ. "Recent" meant in relation to the Choppy/Skipping FAQ. Some of that faq is not very recent anymore.

If you skim through the faqs you can see that there is a wide variety of causes for noise. Some of the biggies were:

>> poorly designed power bricks. Bad power can cause noise in any audio device.

>> wi-fi. When Dell first put wi-fi cards in the laptops often the drivers were not written properly and hogged the cpu, not allowing the audio to buffer in a timely manner (a problem known as excessive DPC latency). The wi-fi devices seem to no longer be a problem, but excessive DPC latency can be caused by any poorly written driver. There are utilities on the internet that can check for excessive DPC latency.

>> power management, from Vista onward. This can be tough to track down because there can be multiple power managers -- Windows, the audio driver, the video driver, the cpu, etc. Currently Realtek seems to be causing noise due to its aggressive power management and there seems to be no user controls over it at all.

>> Intel Rapid Storage Technology caused havoc for a couple of years, but seems to no longer a problem. Most folks didn't even need that software but didn't know it.

>> anti-virus, particularly a program called McAfee Net Guard, also caused havoc for a year or so.

>> Dell software rarely works correctly and sometimes is the cause of noise. The worst offenders were Dell SupportAssist and Dell Support Agent in 2015. Dell got it fixed but recently an owner reported that disabling Dell Diag Control Device solved some noise issues. That service is part of the Dell software that was supposedly fixed.

>> the Realtek driver itself might be causing problems. Many owners have gotten relief from noise by switching from the Realtek driver to the Windows native driver.

>> Windows 10. Old timers like myself have a rule about audio --when you get a stable configuration where the audio functions are optimized, don't change anything. But Windows 10 does not allow for the establishment of a stable configuration. Like it or not, it is constantly inside your computer changing things around. Many audio issues have been reported after Windows 10 "updates".

So good luck with the noise. Keep in mind this advice from the Choppy/Skipping Audio FAQ:

"If you have a brand new laptop and are dissatisfied with the noise in the audio, there is usually a 21 day return policy that I suggest you take advantage of if the solutions below do not help. You will own the problem after the  return period has expired.".