I just "fixed" something I've hated on my 4-year-old HP laptop (the windows one) from day one. It's generally a fine laptop, but it came with "Beats Audio" which is presumably for high quality listening ----- Well, wait a minute, I shouldn't claim to know WHAT it's for, because no matter what I did with it, it always sounded like total crap to me, whether listening on my desk monitors or on headphones.
What prompted this was, just today, a CD I was listening to seemed to exhibit lots of limiting, or compression, and I spent an hour of my life that I'll never get back, running around the house, checking this CD and a few others on a regular player, then back to the laptop to check them again there. I finally narrowed the problem down to just the laptop itself -- as opposed to either a crappily recorded CD, the audio interface, or the speakers or headphones. This "Beats Audio" software thing was doing it, and there was no setting to change that would give me what I wanted, which was a basically unadulterated level of sound at whatever volume setting I chose.
Cutting to the chase, I found other people complaining about the same type of thing, and followed instructions on deleting "Beats" entirely. Doing so forces Windows to install a generic sound driver...and Voila! The new driver does none of that crap. Do the CDs sound like they do when played on my Oppo Blu-ray player? No, of course not. But now I'm rid of so much bizarre filtering and such that I can hardly believe that such a significant improvement was to be had so easily.