Rich, Matt is spot on concerning how to drive a Line from your laptop into any amplified speaker system. That not only goes for Studio Monitors, but for PA and other amplification systems as well.

Most laptops, we use the Earphone Jack as the output to drive an analog Line Input on amplified speaker system of any kind. That is perfectly sound as the Earphone output can indeed electrically drive a consumer level Line Input properly - but only if the line is driven about as hard as the earphone amplifier circuit can drive the impedance of a Line input.

In layman's terms, always make sure that the Software Sound Device's Mixer applet for Playback has the Master Fader turned ALL THE WAY UP when driving an exterior line level amplifier, also make sure that the sub-faders for the playback of the media you are playing back are also turned up, at least 75% of their full travel or better.

This is because DRIVING the line is always a better situation than tryhing to "suck" the signal out of the line from the other end by turning up the amplifier gain, which is a recipe for bad audio due to the higher Signal-to-Noise ratio that such attempts must bring into the thing, as well as the fact that much of the amplitude of the signal isn't going to be there in the first place, which can and does result in a "thin" sound due to mismanagement of the Gain-Staging.

The modern laptop's built in sound is pretty darn good in the Playback department. This is due to the widespread consumer interest in the playback of music, video, etc. It is the Record side of these soundcards that are nut up to the same kind of specs and if you are recording analog input sources such as Mic, that would be the time to look into an aftermarket sound device designed for the home or semi-pro recordist. Playback should sound pretty much equal to the playback on your big DAW computer if the laptop is set properly as described.


--Mac

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