[sophiesophie]

Help me!  Help me!  I've connected my laptop to my receiver via the laptop headphone jack, and RCA connectors through the receiver's CD input.  I'm playing iTunes, and the sound through the headphone jack of the receiver is perfect, but the speakers connected to my receiver sound horrible!
 
What's up, good people of head-fi?

 

[fabio-fi]

Which receiver you have? 

 

[sophiesophie]

Luxman R-113.  Late 80s.   But I tried a friend's brand-new Sony and it was exactly the same problem.

 

[tmars78]

How loud do you have the volume on the laptop, and how do you have the eq set? I used to do exactly what you did, and if the volume was set too high, or eq was boosted, I got horrible distortion. 

 

[sophiesophie]

I have the laptop volume up to about half, but on the receiver I have to lower the bass a ton, and up the treble a ton.  It's all crap.  But headphones are fine. 

 

[tmars78]

Does the receiver have an auxiliary input? If so, have you tried it there? I am not saying it would help, but you never know. You have to try everything, and work by process of elimination. Have you lowered the volume on ITunes? or is that at full blast? 

 

[JRG1990]

You should get a proper dac, using a laptops headphone jack is bad idea because of high noise and disortion its a headphone jack with a headphone amp designed to drive headphones not give the correct output for a speaker amp, something like the htr music streamer will do.