mp3 use - laptop purchase
On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Ben Messinger wrote:
>
> I need to purchase a laptop within the next two weeks. One of the most
> critical factors is superb sound support. One of the primary functions
> of my laptop will be to serve up mp3's through an ampliphied sound
> system at dances. I also am looking for a laptop with at least
> 1024x768x24bit resolution/color.
>
> Please let me know which laptops have sound working well under Linux. I
> am not so concerned with the quality of the speakers on the laptop, just
> the quality of the signal at the line-out jack. Thanks in advance!
>
I'm not sure whether you would want a laptop if this is more or less what
you plan to use your computer for. You have to decide whether its worth
spending more or less double your money on a laptop for what you could get
for half the price in a desktop form (and usually for better).
I would recommend any "bog-standard" Celeron 500Mhz desktop with an Aureal
Vortex 2 card (around £65) thrown into one of its PCI slots. The Aureal
Card is a very good card with digital in/out ports on it, also providing
damn good sound quality.
Remember on a laptop quality is often sacrificed for space (except for IBM
thinkpads, however they are usually quite big) and so the sound although
claiming to be 16bit may in real use be quite cruddy.
You may say that only one of the uses of the laptop is to play mp3's,
however how portable is your amplifier and its speakers? not very I would
imagine. If you want a laptop I would buy a resonable "arounder" (if such
a thing exists, you kjnow what I mean) and then as your mp3 player get an
old 75-100Mhz Pentium with the aureal card thrown in and plugged into your
amp. With a 1Gb harddisk you should be able store about 20-30 albums and
also use the machine as a proxy server or fileserver. The old pentium
will just sit in a box next to your amp, no need to move it
around. Laptop's are not really mp3 players, and if I'm wrong their damn
expensive ones :)
Alex (soon to build an linux based mp3 car stereo from scratch for a
friend :) )
--
** ((__)) Alexander "Jim diGriz" Clouter
\\ ((oo))
\\------\\// e-mail: alexander.clouter@ic.ac.uk
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~~~ ~~~ equip : 300Mhz Celeron Laptop running
Cow during an Debian Potato Linux
Earthquake
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