Hello? ? ? ? Is Anybody Home ?? ?

One thing you can do is get one of the USB Audio devices for your laptop, it plugs in to the USB port and produces reasonable line-level audio, which will work fine as the input to your amp. Whether it is compatible with your DVD codes is something I do not know, but it will work fine with MP3 playback and DIVX encoded movies, in short, with anything that will play back through the windows sound system. You can find these little gadgets at compusa and such, for $99 or so. I don't remember off the top of the head who makes them.

A suggestion for making your battery last: Turn of everything you don't absolutely need, like IR port, printer port, serial port, firewire, you name it. Turn your screen brightness down, and if you're playing from media other than HD, set the sleep timer on your harddisk very short. If only listening, have your screen turned off.

On my 505G with extended battery, running the machine on 25% CPU, screen off, all ports off, harddisk not spinning and using just the PCMCIA slot and CPU, the batteries last nearly 7 hours, as opposed to two with everything on. On my 505LS, the battery lasts 55 minutes with the machine going full speed, but almost 3 hours with screen and HD off, and CPU running at 25% speed.

BTW, you do get some really funny looks when juggling two seemingly identical laptops on an airplane... Good thing noone has yet figured out what wireless ethernet is, I am sure if they knew, I wouldn't be allowed to use it.

Niels.

Is anybody out there?

Battery consumption is definitely an issue. Sound quality should be very good with the headroom amps. They have a very high incoming impedance--so those lousy op amps aren't really doing anything--sure they do degrade a little bit, but let's face it the CD transport is not exactly high end either. I wouldn't worry about the sound degredation from going through the board amps.

I do quite a bit of travelling, and music while travelling (good quality) is very important to me. I use the Etomatic ER-4S headphones, the Airhead amplifier (the special edition) and recently purchased a PJB-100, which is an MP-3 jukebox with 6.4 gigs of hard disk storage. Headroom recommended this MP-3 player--and they weren't even selling it. I've gotten good advice from them before so I bought it. I love it. The sound is better than most portable CD players and I can store about 70 CDs and a high bit rate that preserves good sound quality. Also, I can't say enough about the ER-4S headphones. They reduce noise by 22-25 dB. On a plane--that is great. Well happy listening--hope it makes the travel go easier.

when i can get one-o-dem dsl compootah links (not yet awailable in our area), i will consider gettin a compootah yust for hookin' up to the stereo, so i can listen to wrnr in annapolis...

doug s.

I've been kind of disappointed that this forum hasn't generated more interest as well. I think there's quite a bit of sentiment that "good sound" and "PC" don't go together, quite possibly for good reason

I did, however, come across a cool looking product that merges computers and good sound. Made by Lansonic, it basically is a file server / decoder with "audiophile-quality" A/V interfaces. It connects to an NT-based network using ethernet, and supports a browser-based control program. It has a hard drive, but can access any drive on the network. You can have multiple copies on the network. All of which adds up to having your music library in one place, listenable on any system in your house and controllable from any computer on the network. Full juke-box-like functionality.

Of course, it's still basically version 1.0 and it's still pretty expensive ($700-$2000 depending on HD size), and HD sizes still pretty much prohibit exact copies of what's on the CD if you have much of a music collection. It's still going to be a stretch to get audiophiles to buy into this concept. But the idea is something I've been waiting to see arrive for a couple years now, and in a couple more it should be everywhere. -Kirk