Thinkpad sound quality question

Is the sound quality of thinkpads really bad? I am not expecting super audiophile sound, but I do love my CD collection and will be very annoyed by constant interference noise/poping noise described by some people.

 

no, its not really bad. its average , i would say. or a bit above that.
that means youre probably getting quite a bit of noise + hiss , specially when using the ac-adapter (this is the case with lots of laptops...).
i would suggest to not bother about that, and get a firewire soundcard. Theres many options av. these days, starting quite cheap. For exmpl., check out the behringer 24bit/96k firewire thing.

 

let me add:
- noise + hiss is not equal pops+clicks, those are caused by too small buffersizes for the audio card , usually. In that regard, the thinkpad models have quite good cards+ drivers
- its not *that* bad, when on ac power, usually. Meaning, you only hear the noise when turning up the music LOUD and the music itself is 'quiet'. As with all things sound/noise, this is of course highly subjective...

 

It is difficult to answer such a broad question. ThinkPads are not the same across the entire product line and I have not experienced the problems you describe. Can you point to some posts that mention the "constant interference noise/popping noise described by some people?"

 

The speakers on my R aren't half bad. They unfortunately are on the front and face down. When you are typing on the keyboard it muffles the sound.

 

The speakers on my T are good enough to use if I don't have headphones or normal speakers available. They're plenty loud, but of course there is no bass. I would imagine that the X series has terrible onboard sound, considering it has only 1 speaker that is on the bottom of the notebook.

 

the onboard speakers certainly are not a strong point of the X60
The sony sz i had for a while had the best onboard speakers ive heard so far.
(well, the fan noise didnt really make that stand out very well though hehe).
My T40p has ok speakers, but not great either.

 

Z series have a perfect location for speakers, in left and right side of the keyboard face on top. It still not as good as harman kardon at toshiba though.

 

dude, what r u smoking? He asked about listening to CD music not a portable music production studio setup Beside, unless you get Z-series, he wont get a firewire interface and will have to go with a pcmcia card adapter.

None of the Thinkpad speakers are designed for a quality listening and can not handle a wide dynamic range of sounds to cover all the lows and highs. But, if you gonna listen to music with headphones, you can get a decent results if you invest into good cans like Sony MDR-7506. I actually do most of my music pre-production exclusively with those directly connected to headphone jack. I don't even bother using my Indigo I/O card anymore...

 

I'm not worried about the onboard speakers. I want to know about the quality of signal coming out of the sound card. I am trying to choose between a conventional external speaker setup and a usb speaker setup. If the sound card is not good. I will choose the usb speaker to bypass it. I don't have the money for a serious audiophile setup, and I am not expecting one. But I do want enjoy my Beethoven collection at its fullest possible glory without breaking my bank.

 

I think most of the "usb" type of speakers are for multimedia use and very low power (will distort at low volumes with classical music). Can you post a link to what are you choices? From the other side, your headphone output is an analog signal, quality of which depends on A/D used between analog-to-digital conversion between source and the output. When you deal with anything analog and built into laptop, it will have a poor ground isolation which will introduce more noise and pops since the ground is shared between all the components inside of your laptop (even so in theory everything supposed to be filtered and isolated, bla, bla, bla). So, for example, if you have speakers connected to headphone output and during listening a CPU fan will kick in, this will introduce extra distortion. USB will be clean since you are completely isolated within digital domain. The switch to analog will be done at your speaker level and will depend on the quality of their electronics. In a way, USB speakers will be like a combination of external usb audio card with speakers.

Sorry for too much details, but hopefully you will find it useful.