Crappy playback from laptop through a mixer

[grazzhoppa]

We got this Dell Latitude and the sound it puts out horrible. It's sounds like frequency ranges are being cut out...something like listening to a radio broadcast recorded, played back, then recorded again from the copy recording. And what's strange, is when the CPU is working hard, the sound quality gets worse. Is this a common thing with all laptops?

We just want to play music from the laptop into a mixer. It's not the mixer cause CD and MD sources are crystal clear. The cables we're using are top quality too.

Is the only way to remedy this problem to buy an external sound card for the laptop, or will the sounds always be bad quality?

We're using the headphone out jack on the laptop, because that's the only line-out there is. We have it coming into the high-level-input in the mixer. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

[Sui]

The problem is in the laptop hardware. The codec there are using is not the best in the world.

An external sound card would be the solution. There are USB and 1394 as well as PCMCIA cards that will allow you to get great audio out of your Dell.

M-Audio as a big line of USB sound cards.

Edriol has USB sound cards.

Echo has PCMCIA sound cards.

M-Audio and MOTU have 1394 sounds cards.

There is a big price range and depending on how may output and input, there are a lot of choices.

Good luck,

Sui