m1330 external speakers

Hi. Another m1330 question. While using it at my desk at home I'll want to have it hooked up to my speaker system. With past machines the headphone jack has been on the back or on the side, however, on the m1330 BOTH jacks are on the front. Having a cable running all the way around the machine is not an elegant solution. Is there some other way of getting audio to my external speakers?

 

The only other way would be using some kind of HDMI adapter box (and that would be digital audio, to go to for example an S/PDIF input) or use some other add-on audio device (ExpressCard, USB, or Firewire audio). One other possibility is bluetooth audio, again requiring external device. Yes, too bad those ports are not on the side ...

 

Thanks for your reply. I don't want to have another box on the desk if at all possible. The remaining option would seem to be a firewire to RCA cable. Does such a thing exist?

 

You could get a set of USB speakers. Search on Amazon or Newegg for "laptop speakers" and they will show you a list of speakers that work through the USB ports.

 

Good idea however I just want to plug the laptop into my existing (quite powerful) speaker system. I presently use a headphone jack to RCA converter cable which does the job perfectly. If a firewire-to-RCA cable existed it would seem to be a nice solution.

 

How about wireless USB

 

ARRRGGGHHHH

 

I'm going to have the same problem if I go for the M1530 later this year, as I won't be able to stand having the cable sticking out the front of the laptop and no dock station available

My thoughts were to get a USB soundcard (or possibly USB speakers if I upgrade) and have that plugged into the USB hub under the desk which would be getting plugged in anyway.

 

I have been exploring this quite a bit because because at home I want to "dock into" a DVI monitor and external amp/speakers, and use bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I initially thought it would not be too difficult to split the hmdi signal into video (dvi) and audio (s/pdf) using a splitter cable then run the digital audio to a surround sound speaker setup. Unfortunately such cable does not exist. It is not just splitting required, there is some conversion of audio signal. I have seen about a dozen boxes (converters) that do this but every one of them costs over $200 and most are much more. So much for using hdmi for audio. It is easy enough to use the hdmi port for dvi connection with a cheap cable (no audio).

That leads back to the original problem of routing audio. There is an ExpressCard option with a Surround Sound add-on, but I want to use ExpressCard port for eSATA controller to connect external hard drive. So I will probably go with the USB audio. That is probably the cheapest and easiest way. The turtle beach Audio Advantage Micro is cheap. If you want better quality you could go with the m-audio Transit. In the future I will probably appreciate the hdmi port more, but for now its a pain and I wish there was DVI video and S/PDIF audio instead of analog VGA and S-Video.