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EasyEffects can massively improve laptop speaker sound quality
Virtually all laptop speakers suck. It’s the one area where even really expensive laptops tend to fall on their ass, leaving users with a tinny, harsh, and hollow sound experience. While you can’t exactly overcome physics – laptop speakers are necessarily small and thus just cannot ever sound as good as proper speakers – there’s a lot you can do with proper tuning and software magic. If you’re a desktop Linux user, you actually already possess all the plumbing needed to fix your audio; it’s just not exposed to you in any way. Luckily, an application called EasyEffects allows you to actually make use of desktop Linux’ advanced audio features to massively improve the sound quality of your laptop’s speakers.
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EasyEffects’ own description on its GitHub page doesn’t really explain what it does or what it’s capable of, so here’s the description from Wikipedia instead.
EasyEffects uses PipeWire to process incoming and outgoing audio streams independently and can apply various sound effects in the form of plug-ins made by different developer teams such as Calf Studio Gear, MDA.LV2 and GStreamer. All plugins have their own presets and can be applicable inside the suite rather than having to use a different mixer or executing a script from the command line.
Available output effects are limiter, auto volume, compressor of dynamic range, filter, 30 bands parametric equalizer, bass enhancer, exciter, reverbation, crossfeed, delay, maximizer and spectrum analyzer. Available input effects are WebRTC, limiter, compressor, filter, equalizer, de-esser, reverbation, pitch shift and spectrum analyzer.
None of this matters, and you can forget everything from these two paragraphs.
What matters is that using EasyEffects, you can tune the audio coming out of your speakers to make them sound a lot better. The few laptops on the market that do have decent audio – MacBooks, some Dell XPS laptops, and surely a few more – aren’t magically defying physics. While they probably do have objectively higher-quality speakers, the main difference between those laptops and laptops with crappy-sounding speakers is that the former come with built-in tuning from the factory to make them sound much better than they would without any software trickery.
If you know your way around audio, you can very much use EasyEffects and tune your laptop speakers from scratch to massively improve how they sound. However, that requires time, experience, knowledge, and expertise that most people lack, including myself. Lucky for us, though, there are countless downloadable presets out there for EasyEffects designed specifically to make laptops sound better.