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I think the big thing with the MacBook Pro's is they don't really suffer from electrical noise and other interference picked up from the computer, as is common with basic PC sound cards. Maybe people mistake this for decent sound quality?
There is definitely room to improve the sound coming from a MacBook.
Not gonna be a popular opinion but I believe people with Macs have a completely different decision from those with PCs. The standard advice about....
- needing to get away from the noise in the box
- neeeding to get an external DAC to improve what is on the sound card
- needing an amp to drive good phones
- and on and on and on.....
is all less relevant to us so-called Apple fanboys. Yes, improvements can still be made and I have indulged in some. But the sound out of Macs (at least those produced in the last coupla years) is quite strong and refined. The upgrade for Mac owners is much more subtle. The cheapest way for a mac owner to get good SQ? Buy some really great phones and plug them into the back. Not my choice (at least right now) but that should be a real option for the music lover smart enough to have bought a Mac. Simple, less expensive, and 90%+ of what you are likely to achieve by spending a lot more.
Yeah but the insane price of the laptop offsets the price you save by not buying audio gear
Am I missing something here? Macs use Intel HD audio, which is the same crap used in every other laptop produced in the past two years. Maybe it is better shielded and doesnt hiss, but it is still a bad sound card. And as for driving the phones, my Dell Inspiron 9300 drives my HD580s just fine. They hiss and the sq is crap, but it drives them.
Am I missing something here? Macs use Intel HD audio, which is the same crap used in every other laptop produced in the past two years. Maybe it is better shielded and doesnt hiss, but it is still a bad sound card. And as for driving the phones, my Dell Inspiron 9300 drives my HD580s just fine. They hiss and the sq is crap, but it drives them.
Nope: you're not. Same hardware, same Intel platform, and AsusTek and other PC ODMs manufacture MacBooks. Let them believe what they want to believe
Well, one thing that might be contributing is that Macs are Bit-Perfect out of the box, so that comes as a surprise to many long time pc users. But yes, the sound out of my Macbook Pro far surpasses any laptop I have used before.
All fanboy discussion aside (OK that's not possible I know ), how is the iMac in this regard? Next time I get a pooter upgrade I'm looking at the iMac.
Given that senns&nonsense really doesn't know much about the hardware inside his MacBook, and seems to struggle in operating a computer, I suppose it is asking a bit much of him for him to use Bootcamp and RMAA to produce some results demonstrating that the mere fact that he has an Apple logo on his Asus-produced notebook means that the on-board audio, which one might except to find precisely the equal of that in every recently built 'beige box' for the reason that it is the same or similar to the audio chipset found in every recent 'beige box', transcends such homogeneous and plebeian devices
Originally Posted by bindibadgi
All fanboy discussion aside (OK that's not possible I know ), how is the iMac in this regard? Next time I get a pooter upgrade I'm looking at the iMac.
It is on-board audio; how much can you expect? If I were you, I would just use S/PDIF and send to an external DAC.
), how is the iMac in this regard? Next time I get a pooter upgrade I'm looking at the iMac.
Linear Mode
