Laptop Volume Oscillations

[Meehael]

Hi everyone,

I encountered a weird situation today. I listen to music on my laptop with headphones plugged in almost every day while at work, but this was the first time something like this happened: I played a WAV track for the first time and immediately I noticed at least four volume oscillations in the track, always at same track times. I figured it must be a faulty track, but when I copied the WAV file to my other PC to test it, there was no such issue! I used the same headphones in both cases.

What could be the culprit?

I have a HP Probook 4740s laptop and a PC. Both use Windows7 64bit with latest updates and I use Winamp v5.63 (not sure on the exact version for the laptop) for playing music on both of them.

Thanks!

 

[mfenn]

Do the oscillations happen if you play the track back in another player on the laptop such as Media Player Classic, VLC, or foobar2000?

 

[Meehael]

Do the oscillations happen if you play the track back in another player on the laptop such as Media Player Classic, VLC, or foobar2000?

Hi,

I tried playing the file in windows media player an bs.player, and the issue persists!

Thx

 

[Meehael]

Found the culprit!

It was "SRS Premium Sound". Once I disabled the "Audio Enhancement", all was normal!
I guess it came with laptop sound drivers. Talk about premium sound and audio enhancement -.-
It must've manipulated the playback in some cases.

 

[Cerb]

It was probably normalizing dynamically, or maybe even compressing, as part of its 'enhancement'.

 

[mfenn]

It was probably normalizing dynamically, or maybe even compressing, as part of its 'enhancement'.

:thumbsup: I was thinking that there was some sort of dynamic range compression going on. I suggested trying different players as a way to narrow down whether the player or the drivers was doing it.