Acer Iconia W4 Headphone output quality?

So since the Surface mini is dead I want an 8 inch Win8 tablet to use primarily as my portable audio player. I'm currently using a Surface pro for this but want something smaller with better battery life.

I'll be using the metro app media monkey to pull my lossless audio library through DLNA on my home wifi network. This setup work perfectly on my Surface and the headphone output of the surface pro sounds good and is very clean and power my headphone very well without an external amp.

After reading tons of reviews of the W4 i have not found a single one that comments on the headphone output of the W4.This would be the most important thing about the tablet ot me and is going to be hard for me to try out myself.

So if the headphone output of the W4 any good? Is it clean without any background noise? Is it powerfull enough to drive full sized headphones? Any static or popping noises that comne our of the headphone jack? Typical battery life streaming music?

Like I said I have this setup going for my siurface pro and it works perfectly i just want a smaller tablet with better battery life and has a good sounding headphone jack.

TIA

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billsey

I noticed no issues with the W4 and my headphones when I was evaluating it, but I'm not an audiophile...

chriva

It has quite clean sound but it lacks power.

Lets say it really hates my AKG k601 phones. Like most portable products so nothing out of the ordinary there

/Edit. Bad engrish

swanlee

Are those headphones generally hard to drive? The surface pro drives my AIAIAI TMA-1 pretty well, they are 32ohm

Just looking for something that can drivethese as well as my Surface pro. I'd rather not use a portable amp as that would defeat the purpose of buying something smaller and more portable with better battery than the surface pro.

Thinking I'm going to have to try some in a store as their is little to no reviews on the headphone outputs of these smaller tablets.

Edit to research the AKG's

Looked up those AKG's and they look pretty nice but probably hard to drive without an amp. Even with the low power did the output sound good?

chriva

They are at 120ohms so they are qenerally not good for portable use as you say. I can't complain about the sound quality itself, Only the volume, but that was to be expected. I tried them just for the fun of it. I also have a pair of koss porta pro and those where loud enough to make it uncomfortable instead. Hehe

swanlee

Cool, my current headphones are 32ohms the koss are 60 ohms so looks like I'll get plenty of volume out of this tablet. Sucks I went around town trying to look for one in a store to listen to and could not find one but your info has pretty much confirmed what ineeded to know, just want loud and clean headphone output, I saw two refeiws on amazon saying the hedphone jack crackled on them alot but that is the only place I've seen this problem reported.

I use the Metro app mediamonkey on my surface pro, so far it is the best audio player app Ihave foun , it is metro based so it will play while I'm doing other things and it has a nice EQ and premap adjustment and overall sound really good. I have my 3TB's of lossless audio on a dlna server and mediamonkey easily picks up the entire library. So this is a great solution for around the house headphone listening where I have dlna access to all my audio. Surface works well it just only gets about 5hrs battery and is to large as a portable music player.

Looks like the Acer W4 will work for this really well.

It is currently at an awesome price on amazon

$259 for the 64GB version

chriva

Gotta try that app you are using. I'm currently stuck with winamp that I like to use on my regular computers but it's a pain to use on a tiny tablet like this. Just trying to exit the **bleep** thing is a feat of its own =P

Have not heard any scratching sounds yet but perhaps it takes a while before it happens? Can't say I play music on this thing very often though. I mainly use it when tuning cars since I got tired of carrying my old behemoth around that also had begun to develop a bad battery. Amazingly i've managed to put the tablet, a wireless bt keyboard, all cables and adapters plus an old Aspire ONE, which I also bought just to simplify typing if I need to do som heavy modyfications of firmwares, into one 10 inch carrying bag. I love this thing!

chriva

Just a quick update. I tried the app you mentioned and I gotta say it's a keeper.

Thank you!

swanlee

Can you check the sounds option in windows and go to playback then advanced and see if you can asjust the bit depth? Mine is greyed out and stuck at 16bit 48k. Would love to get it at 24bit 96k. I have alot of high fes lossless audio.

chriva

Mine is also greyed out but the driver reports 100-200khz hardware playback capabilities. Tried a 192khz file and it seems to play it all right. Not sure if windows downmix things or not, though. I'll try to investigate this further when I get home.

swanlee

Thanks, never seen a modern soundcard only support 16 bit 48k. Odd one hope it can be fixed in a driver

Leonid

Hi Swanlee, Have you contacted Acer support about the audio specs? Seems like they should know and a chat should work to get them.

swanlee

I contacted acer chat and they confirmed the soundcard in the W4 is the following

Realtek ALC5642, which will have the resolution Two 24bit /8kHz~192kHz I2-S/PCM.
Subin: The sampling rate is 48 khz, up to 192Khz resolution VSR (Variable Sampling rate).

So this is good news onthe hardware side

However they had me update my driver packeg and firmware and Win 8.1 is still locked at 16bit 48K and is greyed out.

Wondering if I can install generic relatke drivers to fix it?

They said to contact level 2 support when they are open monday.

Either the Acer firmware drivers lock it down for some dumb reason or it is greyed out cause it is variable? Thst last part is just a guess, I've never seen a modern windows pc of any type that did not allow you to adjsut the resolultion and bit rate.

swanlee

So this ordeal continues

Leve 2 support was useless, they bascially said this is not within their support parameters and tough luck go away. I told them screw that level 1 says the hardware supports 24bit 96K but for some reason the acer/intel drivers or Acer firmware is not allowing windows to select any option in the sound properties and the option is gretyed out and stuck in 16bit 48K.

I told them it was not acceptable and asked them to transfer the ticket to the system engineers whihc they did. So 2 days later and still not update on the ticket.

I'm going to stand firm on this of the hardware support 24BIT 96K whihc it does then windows should allow me to choose that as the sound output option.

billsey

It looks like Realtek released new drivers on their website in May. Are they newer than the ones you have installed? Realistically, everyone has to wait for Realtek to provide drivers that work as advertised. Once they are released by Realtek they need to be vetted by each product manufacturer, and that takes time.

swanlee

I installed the realtek software and it did not do anything output optiosn are still greyed out. It didn't change the driver version of the soundcard either even though it apeared to install correctly.

swanlee

FYI here is the setting that is greyed out

Also the actual Sounbdcard driver shows shows the sound card as Intel SST Audio Device WDM.

So we have an Acer tablet with a Realtek Soundcard using an Intel driver.

I'm sure each of these support teams are going to point to each other and brush it off. Ultimately I'm going to hold Acer responsible for fixing this.

audio2.jpg

swanlee

Here is the driver, even after the realtek install it is the same as it was before

driver.jpg

swanlee

So started looking around I was able to find a newer intel sst WDM driver 603.9600.1948.30594 I was able to extract the audio portion of these drivers from a lenovo driver set but it did not work, when I tried to replace the drivers in the acer it said it was not intended for this device.

Pretty sure this is the last stop for me actually being able to solve the issue on my own.

Hardware supports higher resoltuion and bit rates I don't care who does it but either intel, realtek or acer need to come up with some drivers or a registry hack or something that will let me change the default bit rate and resolution in windows.

swanlee

I got a response and it is a baytrail issue, real bummer it will not be fixed

This audio problem is a limitation of the LPE (Low Power Engine) utilized with this Intel Bay Trail solution. They say that all systems that use Intel Bay Trail will have this limitation, regardless of who makes the computer. We have formally requested Intel to improve this in the next generation of CPU solutions but there will not be a fix for the current W4-820. It will only be able to a utilize a 16-bit, 48000 Hz sample rate."

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