

Music sounded the best for what I was listening to, and having TrueHarmony enabled does help the sound a lot on its own, but you still won't be getting premium-level audio. You can find Acer's TrueHarmony tuning in the app, which features three presets: Music, Movie and Game. You can (kind of) customize the audio via the built-in Realtek Audio Console.

MORE: Cheap laptop for music production | Tom's Guide Forum And when more than two instruments were playing at once, the sound turned muddy. However, the percusion, especially the bass, sounded a little hollow. However, the acoustic guitar that opens the song sounded appropriately melodic, and the vocals were clear and articulate. I listened to Lund's "Low," which didn't carry that much weight throughout my small room. The Aspire 5's bottom-firing speakers are mediocre, but they could be worse for the price. It does have Windows 10 Precision drivers, so gestures like two-finger scrolling and three-finger tabbing worked as intended. The 4.2 x 3-inch touchpad is a good size and offers a decently soft texture, although the buttons are a little shallow.

The keys are slightly shallow at 1.2 millimeters, which is outside of our preferred 1.5- to 2.0-mm range, but they do require a meaty 78 grams of force to actuate. I managed 70 words per minute on the typing test, which is my current average.
