[jordanr]

This is the soundcard my laptop came with. Is it worth a damn?

 

[Mr.Radar]

Most onboard audio, especially in laptops, sounds pretty bad and almost all resample the audio.

 

[jordanr]

I figured as much. In fact, I never really use my laptop as a source, and so I didn't even bother comparing it to the quality of my portable setup. I was really only asking to see if it would be worthwhile to do some comparisons of different encodings vs. straight cd-audio using my laptop. I guess it's not.

Thanks.

 

[Shift]

I believe one of my Sony laptops had this codec. IIRC it doesn't have very high specs and it is very noisy (at least in my laptop). Plug in any semi-decent pair of speakers and it will hiss/hum loudly when you turn up volume even with nothing playing.

 

[jordanr]

It's a Sony VAIO. I never really wanted to use it as a source; it's just that I have no dedicated DAC with which to compare cd audio to my portable setup. That was my only aim. Most of my tunes are encoded at 320 kbps, so I'm fairly sure I'm not missing much in terms of audio integrity. I just thought it would be fun to compare.