I have a laptop music system and am very happy with it. It happens to be an HP pavilion. I use it on the road (coffee shop or out of town) or at home (hooked to desktop dac & amp). As mentioned before, you could get by with less than a laptop, but I use mine for other purposes too. I run an astronomy program on it when I’m at the telescope in the back yard, surf and email when at Starbucks, etc.
Some lessons I have learned:
If you listen to closed back cans, forget all the talk about ss drives and fan noise – doesn’t matter.
Unlike my desktop pc, I can’t hear the hd in my laptop. I put a half TB drive in the second drive bay ($50) and it is the music library.
I listen to open backed cans. At home I can occasionally hear the fan in the laptop between songs. But I can also sometimes hear the heater or a/c come on. It’s rare that I have no ambient noise when/wherever I’m listening.
I have WMP, winamp, foobar, mediamonkey, xmplay, and a dozen others. For ultimate power and portability I like xmplay. As small or smaller than foobar, free, has a wasapi plugin, solid as a rock, plays internet radio, and doesn’t require installing and doesn’t touch your registry. It resides on a flash drive in my usb port. I can pull it out and stick it in someone else’s computer and it plays instantly. For the geek in me, I like foobar. It’s like a Lego set, and everyone has the parts. Wasapi, skins beyond imagination, everything. Fun to play with and sounds perfect. It would have been my primary music player, but I figured out how to get gapless out of Mediamonkey before I could figure out how to get imbedded album art out of foobar. Both are great. Mediamonkey is super at tagging, correcting spelling and case errors, and library management in general. It will naturally ignore ‘the’ so The Beatles lists between Abba and Cars and not next to The Rolling Stones. Winamp and vst plugins, too.
If you are a geek, strip all the unused processes and options from your operating system.
If you are using usb out for your dac, the usb port you use can make a difference. My laptop has 4 usb ports, but seems to have only 2 usb controllers; each controlling 2 ports. I was getting some noise until I figured out the port I plugged my dac into was controlled by the same controller as the port I plugged my usb mobile broadband into. Switching ports fixed the problem. Disable wireless at home. (You may need it at Starbucks.) When offline, disable your antivirus s/w and automatic program updates.
I started with earbuds from the builtin soundcard and then switched to a portable dac and amp. I already had a mini3 hooked to my Sansa Clip, so I bought a gamma1 dac. Both are the size of a pack of cigarettes. They go in my laptop case when I’m travelling along with headphones.. Now it’s laptop to dac to mini3 to grados. The amp does double duty; laptop or in my pocket with clip when walking.
Of course, I now have another dac at home and an Eddie Current tube amp that’s the size of the battery in my Honda. But that’s what Head-Fi does to you =^)
Don’t know if any of this helps, but . . .
