Inspiron 7559 - sound is awful until I reconnect external speakers

Hello all,

I have a Dell Inspiron 7559 laptop that I bought about a month ago.  When I hook it up to my external speakers and start up a game such as WoW, the sound that comes out of the speakers sounds awful... like it's a way lower bitrate than it shoudl be, missing depth and fullness... almost as if it were coming out of one of those old pc speakers. 

If I unplug the speakers, let the OS realize they were disconnected, then plug them back in again, it works fine. 

Anyone see this before?