XPS 13-9360, Right speaker "blown"

From what I know, my laptop is still under warranty and on-site support.

Hello. If you are asking how to get warranty support, first remove all media players you have installed on the system. If support sees any player other than Windows Media Player, sometimes it will wrongly deny service for speakers, Then contact tech support.

If you were asking something else, please clarify.

Thank you.

So I am pretty disappointed at the ignorance that "Cletus" has displayed at answering my question. I have previously relayed my address and postal code to the support specialist in the first email.

However, replies are extremely slow and the second email just shows a very bad understanding of my problem. I did mention that my right speaker was faulty and I'm sure the representative in the second email thought that it was a coil whine issue. Massively disappointing.

Make plain to support that you have distortion in the speaker. Distortion is not an artifact of "normal" coil whine.

You could try the ePSA hardware speaker test. But it only plays some tones, so not sure if you could hear distortion during the test. Whatever you hear during the test is in the hardware. With the website-based tests, you could hear noises that are the fault of Windows or poorly written drivers.

Alright thanks, I will do that

Oh, you should edit your post and remove the text of the e-mails and the case number. I think those things are not allowed on the forum.

replies are extremely slow

Yes. Some other posters have said that live chats work out better than the e-mails.

the representative in Email 2 thought that it was a coil whine issue.

> In your initial post you said that you ran "Dell support diagnostics" and found out the speaker is blown. Can you give more details about that: what diagnostic tool did you use, and what happened during the diagnostic that let you find out that the speaker is blown?

> You said you hear a high pitch buzzing noise. How loud is it? Does the underlying audio have distortion or other blown speaker sounds? When I think of a blown speaker, I do think of buzz, and distortion of low notes, but not high pitched artifacts.

> You said the laptop is 2 months old. Did you hear the noise right out of the box, or did it just recently suddenly happen?

Perhaps if you answer those questions in detail and provide the information to support, you will get a different answer. Naturally support is reluctant to send out a tech if you report symptoms that match normal audio behavior. Some of the newer Dell laptops do have coil whine, which reflects poor engineering on Dell's part, but there might not be anything a tech can do about it.

I will try out the live chat.

I used the diagnostic tool that Dell has on its support website (the one where it plays a sound on left/right speaker to determine if there are any faults with either of them. When the sound played on the right, I could hear a buzz/distortion effect that came with the sound. This was not produced on the left speaker.

I haven't been testing out the speakers since I got the laptop because I use a earphone regularly. I therefore cannot confirm if its like that out of the box.

Support has even requested for my address already, so I assume that the next step was to get a technician on the way. I do know about the coil whine issue and it is definitely not that.

Thanks for your advice and hearing me out.

Hi there, sorry to hear about the support getting setup, can you Private Message me your Service Tag and I can at least check to make sure this is moving forward? 

-jimco,

Thanks for all of the help here!

Best regards,

Brad

I have called Dell this morning to arrange for an engineer to fix the problem onsite. Hopefully it will go well.

Thanks so much for the update and the email yesterday. Let me know how it goes and Private Message/email me if this doesn't get resolved correctly. Hopefully this is a quick service call.

Best regards,

Brad 

-jimco, Thanks for all of the help here!

Brad, thank YOU. It's great to get a little help from Dell every now and then.