Good phones and usb dac/amp or rely on my HP beats audio and get better ones?

Different headphones will usually make a bigger difference to the sound than the addition of an amp and/or dac. So if you just want to experiment with a different sound, I'd say spend the money on headphones.

As far as I can tell, the Beats-branded computers don't really have anything that would make the sound different. Most of the difference is with the appearance and the included software.

The headphones will definitely show differences, by virtue of the fact that nearly everything you do to a headphone can alter its sound in some way. I have no doubt that the Beats Audio headphones will sound different than other headphones.

If you look at the press release for the computer, though, you won't find anything mentioned about the audio output devices of the computer, so my guess is it is the same in that regard as any other HP computer.

I too would like to know whether the onboard sound card/amp is good enough to drive mid-market headphones. If not then what was the purpose of the whole branding thing?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Scarecrow145 

I too would like to know whether the onboard sound card/amp is good enough to drive mid-market headphones. If not then what was the purpose of the whole branding thing?

Well, you bought the laptop didn't you? That's all branding needs to do, make you buy it.

Alright, I'm running a new HP DV6-6135dx here (with HP Beats-branded audio) and I can safely say that if I were you I'd put that money toward a decent set of headphones. Before you do that, do yourself a favor. Disable Beats Audio (Fn + B, but I'm sure you already know this). Then go into sound preferences in control panel, double click on your audio device, hit the tone controls tab, and adjust both bass and treble to ZERO. I've found that the HP Beats Audio panel (really just a standard IDT codec panel with a different skin and the cheesy Beats effects) likes to screw with those tone controls in Windows. When you enable Beats Audio, it jacks bass and treble up to +4 each, but get this- when you DISABLE Beats, it turns bass down to -14, effectively making your original signal sound remarkably weak in comparison. Anyways, to get back to your original question, my DV6's internal codec powers my Audio-Technica ATH-M50's quite well, and I'd have to say it sounds about on par with, possibly better than, my ASUS Xonar DG desktop sound card with discrete headphone amp. It's definitely cleaner than straight from my Creative Zen, too. This is just my impression, but I'd have to say with Beats disabled and the settings returned to normal, this is one nice sounding mobile machine. There is, however, a tiny amount of background hiss, but you'll probably only notice it with some highly sensitive 'phones. Just my two cents. Oh, and on a different note, if yours is an AMD A-series equipped model, look into undervolting that CPU too. By undervolting my A8-3500m, I gained right around an hour of battery life with the same clock rate. 

</rant>

Sure thing! It really seems that the hardware of the Beats system is above average, but the software squanders that by default. Glad to help. Now to go about removing that silly Beats Audio logo on the bezel of my screen.. I'm really not a fan of being classified as a "Beats" user, even if Beats effects are turned off. 

What model is your laptop? If your control panel pane is anything like mine (see below), you should be able to disable it from there as well. I just unchecked the Beats Audio checkbox, but yours could be different.

I just got a new HP laptop. I couldn't believe how muddy the speakers sounded when I was loading iTunes. Checked the beats audio on the bottom and it comes out of the factory with the bass boosted to max.

It sounds fine when you turn that crap off, I just find it ridiculous that people look for this feature. 

On the plus side, I have just read the headphone connect should be clean, and have tested out a few other HP laptops and find that the internal amp is pretty good. Just make sure you turn off the BEATS processing.