The small sized speakers in laptops are never going to give high quality sound. Headphones can do better because they are closer to the ear.
However, @Meow69 may have a point. With my older desktop, the sound was never good unless I first booted into Windows and then rebooted to linux. My current desktop does not have that problem.
i did get one issue from pulse audio , audio was getting worse with time until i restart linux otherwise it was only cracking sound, i manage to fix issue i had to edit config file for pulse audio to fix the EQ to 44hz or 48hz i dont remember, otherwise the fix was to kill pulseaudio and use alsa directly with dmix (but i could find a way to get microhphone workingwith dmix dsnoop)
(i was on ubuntu or centos the issue was same on both with realtek audio chip)
if i used the external hp with there own dac there was no issue.
That won’t work for many folks - I’ve got a desktop and a laptop and neither have WIn installed (natively or in a VM), as I have zero use for it.
It’s been my experience that the physical speakers in a laptop just aren’t up to the job of “quality sound”. Once you get beyond a certain volume level (70-80%), the audio quality degrades.
If music is mostly desired, external speakers (Bluetooth?) might be an option, and of course, headphones, or maybe even good quality earbuds.
My laptop is a Dell L attitude, which I occasionally use to watch TV shows (streamed), where the audio is quality-enough for something like that.
Did you tap on the Profile drop-down??
Check my screenshot of a portion of your screenshot (just below) and check the arrow pointing to the Profiles drop-down.
The choices won’t always be the same across machines, but what you’re showing and what I show (previous screenshot) are different
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If you want to understand what can be done in principle you may find an introduction here
If you deem it worth the effort, there might be a solution also by modifying pipewire (or pulseaudio) configs, but some work by trial and error might be involved.
Apparently your laptop includes some audio optimization from Bang&Olufsen (see here ) so it is very likely that you experienced better sound quality on Win* (with the HP Boost / B&O tuning enabled).
To have a similar experience on Tumbleweed you have to re-create a similar optimization yourself.
Maybe inserting some frequency equalization in front of the speaker output is all you need.
Try installing easyeffects, or use the deadbeef audio player with its equalizer enabled and play with the controls to have an idea of what sounds “acceptable” to you.
Then it might be possible to configure pipewire (or pulseaudio) to mimic a similar response (try starting by looking at /usr/share/pipewire/filter-chain/sink-eq6.conf as an example).
If B&O used more subtle tricks it might not be as straightforward to reproduce the same behavior on linux, anyway that looks well beyond my reach
I have an ancient Acer 5100 laptop. It sounds like … (I don’t know what). But by following these recommendations I managed to achieve at least some results. Have a look, may be it will be usefull.
