go-vibe 5... tips
Jun 29, 2007 at 5:46 PM Thread Starter Post #1 of 30
daveyostrow

daveyostrow

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recently got the go-vibe 5 and mainly use it on my laptop at the moment (dell e1405) and as an amp it works great, but and i cant seem to tell a difference in quality, as when i use an mp3 player i think i notice a very small improvement in the fullness of the music.
anyone have ideas to what it is? could it be just me? maybe i should try something different?
thanks
 
Jun 29, 2007 at 5:54 PM Post #2 of 30
First, if your Dell is like my Dell (a slightly earlier 700m), the built-in sound doesn't have all that high a level of clarity/resolution/fidelity to amplify. It's much harder to hear the difference that amplification makes if you're amping something that's a little murky to start with.

Second, what headphones/earphones are you using? Some (especially "stock" phones/buds that come with budget consumer electronics) are so efficient that they don't audibly benefit from the extra driving power that an amp makes available.

Third, what music files are you using? An amp will make a bigger difference with better-quality, higher-bitrate files than with lower-resolution files, for the same reason that it makes more difference with a higher-quality soundcard than with a stock soundcard.

You'll find lots of suggestions around here for upgrading your laptop's sound card. If on a budget, I think the Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro (USB-based) gives a lot of performance for its $25-ish price. If you can go up to $100, I hear that M-Audio makes a good USB unit in that range, or you could look at the Alien USB DAC in the sponsored thread links above.
 
Jun 29, 2007 at 6:20 PM Post #3 of 30
i saw that alien dac but its out of my range, and i have been lookijng to but the turtle beach. my mp3's are at least 195kbps but they dint make a difference when they were higher bitrates, and im listening through an MS1.
 
Jun 29, 2007 at 6:32 PM Post #4 of 30
I find my Dell laptop's headphone out to be noisy, and as such any detail is certainly gone, at least to "shhhhh". The only "workaround" for me is to use my M-Audio Firewire Audiophile instead. So as episiarch said, I would suggest getting an external soundcard instead. The M-Audio one that episiarch refers to is called the M-Audio Transit, and I think I've seen it for less than $80 here at Head-Fi.
 
Jun 29, 2007 at 6:50 PM Post #5 of 30
195kbps should be plenty, and the MS-1 sounds great unamped but is better still with an amp.

My other piece of advice, besides perhaps upgrading the soundcard, is to spend a week or two listening only through the amp, and only then go back and see how unamped sounds to you. Very often the extra quality you get from a better system isn't instantly apparent...but once you get used to it, the difference between it and something lesser is very easy to detect.

What you'll probably notice with the amp is a better ability to separate layers of the music: if there are many instruments playing at once, you'll be better able to hear what each of them is doing, instead of only hearing the dominant one.
 
Jun 30, 2007 at 12:29 AM Post #7 of 30
I'm sitting at a dell e1505, and I'm afraid it may in fact be just you. The headphone out on this thing is shockingly noisy and seems to attenuate only between kind of loud at minimum and a little bit louder at full volume bar, though in neither case with much detail or clarity. It's very precise with the noise it picks up from the computer, though: the hard driver, monitor, dvd drive, and power supply all have crisply distinct noises. I even spec'ed this computer as the media center version, but all that meant was some crap software I had to uninstall.

Compared to this, the headphone out on my old IBM T30 was far, far better. In both cases, though, a mere TBAAM still clearly outperforms the stock card. Upgrade! You'll be glad you did.

edit: oh, and by the way I have a Go-Vibe V5 as well, and I'd say the TBAAM is more essential to making this laptop listenable than the Go-Vibe, by far. Though the two do sound alright together.
 
Jun 30, 2007 at 1:20 AM Post #8 of 30
i dont think mine has any issues like you mentioned. im still waiting for an answer about a tbaam on another forum but ill defenitly start using the amp exclusivly to get a feel for it.

on a side note there is the charger socket for the go-vibe which doesnt seem to fit any of the ones i happen to have (from phone chargers and such). they look like they should fit but they just dont.
what kind do they work with?
 
Jun 30, 2007 at 3:24 AM Post #9 of 30
Norm doesn't have the Power Supply info posted for the 5 on the web page any more . . . I don't know if it's the same as the 6 because the 6 has a charging circuit.

On this page is a long post about power options that includes some specs:
http://www.head-fi.org/forums/showth...=192007&page=9
 
Jun 30, 2007 at 7:58 AM Post #11 of 30
This may or may not be helpful. . . I've been trying to get decent sound out of my IBM laptop, and really, it's a garbage in - garbage out situation using the headphones out plug. Using my amp attached didn't help a bit--it just amps the bad sound that's coming out. I got the most bang by putting my Ety ER4P>4S converter in line, which really firmed up the bottom on my Edition 9s by a pretty huge margin (Ed 9s-- I shouldn't even be using them on the Thinkpad!). I wonder how that would work with other phones, but haven't tried yet.
 
Jun 30, 2007 at 11:38 AM Post #13 of 30
Yes, but I have this one, which is a lot cheaper:
http://www.head-direct.com/product_detail.php?p=12
Perhaps someone with some actual knowledge of electronics knows what I did?

I'm using (or not using, for that matter, on the computer) a GoVibe 5, myself, but as I said, it didn't do much on my laptop. I also got the idea of skipping the laptop's dac/amp by using a cheap Behringer USB product going to the GoVibe from its line out connection. That was a waste of time, too. I guess the Behringer was no better than what's in the laptop. My conclusion was that in order to make a nice sound come out of the laptop I'd have to sink a bit of real money into the project for a good USB headphone amp--something like the Headroom Total bithead--which I'm not willing to do at this point, since it's not a primary music source for me.
 
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