Surface 2 Speaker/Sound Problems

It seems that this thread describes several *different* issues. That (unfortunately) makes it less likely that all these issues will be fixed promptly.

My main issue is incredibly quiet audio - I think the distortion I hear comes from having to turn up the volume very high just to hear it, and from the audio itself being almost entirely treble frequencies.

If people are getting distortion limited to specific apps I'd expect that is a completely different issue from what I personally have (ALL sound on my device is quiet).

I agree.  I was the original poster for this thread.  I think I am going to make two separate new threads to be very specific to the original issues that I posted about.

1. The overall sound of the Surface 2 speakers is too quiet and hollow (compared with Surface RT).
2. Crackling/popping sounds while streaming Amazon Instant Video through metro and desktop IE browsers.

I recently got a Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet which runs full Windows (not RT). Out of curiosity, I tried streaming Amazon Instant Video on it, and I got the same crackling sound as on my Surface 2. Everything else sounds fine on the Dell, just like on my Surface 2. So it seems the crackling on Amazon Instant Video streaming isn't just a Surface 2 issue. Perhaps a Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 RT issue, or perhaps something is wrong on Amazon's end. Eager to see if a future firmware update resolves this.

It seems that this thread describes several *different* issues. That (unfortunately) makes it less likely that all these issues will be fixed promptly.

My main issue is incredibly quiet audio - I think the distortion I hear comes from having to turn up the volume very high just to hear it, and from the audio itself being almost entirely treble frequencies.

If people are getting distortion limited to specific apps I'd expect that is a completely different issue from what I personally have (ALL sound on my device is quiet).

I'm also experiencing the same crackling sound issue when streaming video from Amazon Instant Video on both versions of IE. I hope a fix is coming for this. It's bad enough there's no Amazon Instant Video app, but now I can't stream through the browser either. The constant crackling is unbearable.

I recently got a Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet which runs full Windows (not RT). Out of curiosity, I tried streaming Amazon Instant Video on it, and I got the same crackling sound as on my Surface 2. Everything else sounds fine on the Dell, just like on my Surface 2. So it seems the crackling on Amazon Instant Video streaming isn't just a Surface 2 issue. Perhaps a Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 RT issue, or perhaps something is wrong on Amazon's end. Eager to see if a future firmware update resolves this.

So what if this problem is 2 weeks old?? That doesn't make it any less of a problem. When Microsoft pays people to come on this thread, read all of our comments, and simply suggest that we return the same device more than FOUR times until we get one that works, THAT IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM. I could care less how knowledgeable the moderator is, he or she is still getting paid by Microsoft to respond to these problems and when their answer is to return the device 4 times, then you will have to excuse me when I get a little frustrated and ask for a better answer from Microsoft who by the way has yet to give one

A similar issue (involving NVIDIA) in RT took more than a month to get fixed.