Thinking of buying XPS 15; one question!

I'm about ready to buy the XPS 15, as soon as a good deal comes along. But in the meantime, I have a question about the sound quality before I drop the money:

1) I know that the JBL speakers on the XPS 15 are one of the best on the market today, but how is the sound quality of the headphone jacks? Is it at least above average? I plan on using high-quality headphones the majority of the time, and I don't want the sound quality from the headphone jack to suck. Can anyone comment?

*I know that sound quality is pretty subjective, but it'd be great to hear what some of you think about how the laptop sounds.

 

1. The JBL speakers are actually terrible acoustically. However, most laptop speakers are straight up garbage, which makes the JBL "one of the best" in comparison.

I mean they sound like a $10 pair of speakers from Staples (a huge upgrade over the $1-2 dollar garbage put in other laptops)

2. There is nothing wrong with the on-board "Realtek High Definition Audio." It drives all my IEM's (Monster MD, Radius DDM1, IE8, TF10, UE700, Mee CC51, Mee A151, etc) fine, however it can't drive my 300 impedance Sennheiser HD600. I wouldn't recommend you use it to drive high end headphones anyways. Get a dedicated DAC and an amp.

 

Yeah, I assumed about the same for the JBL speakers. They might be good relative to other laptop speakers, but in the end they're just laptop speakers, so I'm not expecting anything too special.

Anyway, I'm using Realtek right now on my current laptop also, and it's sufficient but not too impressive. Would the sound quality across all laptops that use Realtek be pretty much the same? I notice that the XPS 15 has something called the WavesMAXX Audio. What exactly is that? Is it like a glorified equalizer?

 

You press the top right most capacitative button, the audio menu comes up.

You can turn on the "Waves MaxxAudio" which consists of the following settings:

MaxxAudio Menu
MaxxBass
MaxxTreble
MaxxStereo
MaxxDialog
MaxxVolume
Sound Leveler/Normal/Midnight (Don't know what midnight is, leveler is a sound leveler)
Equalizer

It also has the Andrea Microphone Technology in this menu with noise reduction and echo cancellation, both work relatively well.

Dell spent a lot of effort on this. It is very polished, but somewhat useless imo.

 

You actually will be impressed by the JBL speakers, i'm so sure of that but of course it can't replace a stereo system.

 

The JBL speakers have impressed people even more than my gf's Logitech AudioHub notebook speakers ( http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-980-...1MB2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310737297&sr=8-1) which require external power and comes with a subwoofer. Of course they are not meant to replace external speakers, but the JBL speakers are quite revolutionary nonetheless.

 

I agree, they blew my Mac mini speakers out of the water. They put my external monitor's speakers to shame. These things can push out some bass. Nothing close to buying a nice external setup of course. I was watching a YouTube video and my girlfriend was watching it across the living room. She even commented on how good they sounded. Even before I told her anything about how good they were supposed to be.

I used to use headphones, cause she is always watching tv next to me and I couldn't hear my stuff good enough. Now I just use the internal and she has to deal a bit.

As far as audio jack, my headset is a little broke (the speaker plug broke off, and the audio plug got bent a little somehow) but it sounded fine to me while gaming. I use the Koss SB45's, just bought a second set.

If you are wondering about professional audio wise, I'm just not sure about that kind of stuff.