I've had this laptop a while now. It's a HP Pavilion DV7. i7 @ 2.2Ghz. 8GB RAM. HD6490M. All in all a good midspec laptop even now.
But beats audio? Who considers this a feature? They should knock money off the price for this desolate peice of **bleep** which is really nothing more than an artifically limited, hardware tied driver.
All Beats Audio does is artifically amplify the bass to ear **bleep** level. That's literally its thing. It's not some refined and high performance sound system and It's only the association with Dr Dre (another thing I consider featureless) that this marketing bollocks ever got off the ground. Now I'm fine with marketing gimicks, because I'm a shattered soul of the 21st Century - but this piece of **bleep** DEBILITATES the capability of system to render audio articulately.
It plays general/pop/hiphop/generally garbage music acceptably. But play anything with treble or otherwise audible contrasts in it? Or perhaps even actually intentional bass?! Welcome to hell. Beats audio ensures your system is automatically primed to play 1/18 of all existing genres of music - but thats ok because you - as a customer - fall into that bracket.
And don't even try to uninstall it or install custom drivers. I mean, sure it works - but your headphone ports wont work since HP decided to exclusively run that special feature through the drivers bespoke - and you'll get exceptionally poor performance through flash/silverlight and video game engines.
It's just such a shame, and HP should be ashamed they cashed in like this. I mean I'm sure hardly any of your dumbass customers even noticed and you made a pretty penny off the arse of it all - but you have certainly lost my future custom. All your computers seem to come packed to the brim with **bleep** (Norton? Really?) any computer literate person immediately rushes to uninstall and the fact you have locked people into this proprietary marketing gimmick that actually damages the users experience is unforgivable.
An option to turn this off would have made this all fine. Seriously. Why do I have to listen to my audio through a filter?
So yeah guys. Beats audio. Submit.