Railworks America

So I bought this over priced MSI hot rod laptop (win10 by the way). It runs Railworks magnificently however the sound is just awful to the point of being unusable. My headphones sound fine if I disable the realtek but when I start RW the darn thing just gets reinstalled and then goes back to awful. Any of you hardware/software guys out there have any suggestions?

Did you try playing with the Realtec settings any? I have one of those built in and it works OK. It could also be that your speakers could be no so good. But I am just guessing here.

I am using headphones and they are fine on my desktop.

Buzz
There's a fair few posts on line about this issue ie poor sound with W10.
For example: http://superuser.com/questions/958121/r ... 10-upgrade
It might be worth contacting MSI support as it may be reported to them and they may have a fix?
Regards
pH

It's funny you would openly admit you overpaid for your laptop. I will be joining that MSI club soon, so you won't be alone. We can whine about their cost together.

As for your sound issue? On my current laptop with Win 10 (I've mentioned this issue here before), I didn't like the RealTek audio driver. It sounded much quieter in my headphones and didn't seem to have as much bass. I forced it to use the Windows High Definition audio driver and it sounds way better. In the beginning of Win 10 (I took the free upgrade at 10's launch from Win 8.1) it would every so often revert back to the Reaktek drivers and I had to go through the process again and again. After a month or so of doing this, it stopped reverting back to the Reaktek drivers.

Every now and then it does revert back, but rarely. I think certain Win 10 updates caused it to do so.

Why did it stop reverting back for long periods of time? I don't know. Maybe it got the hint after several times changing it back to my preferred audio driver. Who knows?!?! I don't have a permanent solution for you, but my method of keep changing it back for whatever reason seemed to have stuck... at least for months on end now. I like to think I beat Win 10 into submission and every once in a great while it likes to test me and revert it back to RealTek.

Does your model of MSI have that Nahimic sound software? I'm wondering cuz my current HP laptop came Beatsaudio software installed that works in conjunction with the Reaktek drivers and I'm curious if it's responsible for yours reverting back in Win 10. Cuz I always suspected Beatsaudio (through never proven) was the one bugging my windows to revert back cuz when I have the Windows High Definition audio driver installed, Beatsaudio software is completely disabled and useless.

Well after reading your post I started poking around and came across this.
https://medium.com/@nathansuwanto/msi-t ... .7xnmfrowg

Soo I went and uninstalled the Nahimic and low and behold now my sound is just loverly. Thanks for the tip. In my case the Realtec seems to be fine. So far.

As far as it being overpriced that's just kind of a gulp at the price cuz I bought the GE72VR Apache Pro with the GTX1060 in it so it got kind of pricey. But it's all in the interest of win10 research for the company.

I suspected Nahimic was the problem because my HP's Beatsaudio software seems to do many of the same functions as Nahimic and disabling it did do wonders. I really never liked the EQ of the software and disabling the EQ helped, but made it even more quiet than before.

That link you posted pretty much exactly describes the issues that I had with the Beatsaudio software. It describes why the volume was lower to begin with and why it gets even quieter when you turn off the effects. Good find!

I'm glad I could help you... and in turn... I helped myself too since I have decided I'm gonna get an MSI laptop over the Sager laptop for reasons I will detail once I get it.

What's cool is at Xotic PC (where I'm gonna get my laptop) is if you pay a little extra ..OR... if you have them install the OS on an SSD drive as the boot drive (the OS is normally installed on the HDD by default unless specified), they then do a clean install with all the MSI bloatware gone from jump!

I left the OS on the big HD and installed RW over on the 'D' drive which is the SSD. It runs very nicely there. Boot time is still around 30 seconds.

Great thread for MSI laptop owners, with TS and Trainz. On both trainsimulators, with my new MSI laptop, I was getting awful whistle sound, especially. After removing Nahimic, the sounds are very good. Thanks for the tips.