How to disable Beats Audio

If you’re like me then you don’t need to hear any reasons for disabling Beats Audio because you just know it’s evil, in which case you can just skip to the end of the article that describes the steps.

My laptop has a piece of software called “Beats Audio” hardwired into my Windows install; and it’s one of the most annoying pieces of software I’ve ever encoutered.

I guess the original intention behind BA was to make very bad sound hardware (cheap laptop speakers) sound “okay” by modifying the sound signal on the software side. This is a neat idea and Beats Audio probably does the job (actually I don’t know, I never listen to music on my laptop speakers). However, as soon as you plug in a good quality heaphones into your laptop, things will get nasty. All the sound boosts do not improve sound, they make everything worse. While you can disable all the equalizer effects displayed above, one functionality does not seem to ever go away:

Beats Audio keeps manipulating sound volume all the friggin time! Even after you disable everything through the user interface.

It essentially turns quiet parts of your music into loud ones. Why on earth would anybody want that is something I’ll probably never understand. Listening to any music becomes a headache-inducing experience. It’s like there’s a little evil monster who took control of your volume slider and is constantly fiddling around with it.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time searching the internet, trying to figure out how to disable Beats Audio indefinitely, I’ve tried various Windows Registry modifications, but the only thing that actually works is this:

1. Go to your Device Manager (Start – Control Panel – Devices and Printers – Device Manager)
2. Locate Sound devices node, find IDT High Definition Audio CODEC, right-click and select “Update Driver Software…”:

3. Click “Browse my computer …” and then “Let me pick …”:

4. Choose “High Definition Audio Device”:

5. Confirm everything.

6. Done!

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