I appreciate the effort and thought that went into this site and the FAQs, for they have been a tremendous help to me in getting started. I have EAC and LAME up and running and I am very happy with the quality of ripped CD tracks. I've switched to a set of ety er6s and have never had this much enjoyment from "laptop" music while traveling. BTW, even the airplane audio goes from sub-AM level to FMish with these little phones.

I have a couple questions related to improving the sound through my Dell Latitude laptop. I'm listening mostly to classical and jazz mp3s encoded aps and played back through winamp 2.91.

1. Are there any setting changes to be made or driver changes that will improve sound quality though my laptop earphone jack? Is there a simple way to mute computer generated sounds other than winamp when I am listening?

2. How much will using an Echo Indigo card reduce my battery life? I haven't seen mention of how much power it draws in reviews, but one reviewer commented it was hot to the touch

3. What kind of sound quality can I expect without a headphone amp with a flash memory based player like the iRiver, Cowon, or Jens of Sweden. I assume it will be better than the laptop headphone jack. Will it be significantly worse than the Echo Indigo?

Thanks,
Alan

Hi, welcome to the coolest forum

Talking about battery life, what's the cpu usage like when using winamp2 to playback mp3 files?

[edit - typos]

You may be able to update the drivers for your built-in audio chipset, but I never found any updates for my Sony VAIO GRX670's integrated audio device (Yamaha AC/XG), so I bought an Echo Indigo. After installation, I disabled my old audio device in Device Manager. As for disabling system sounds, I just turned off the system sound scheme. Go to Control Panel --> Sounds, Speech, and Audio Devices --> Change the sound scheme, and then set the Sound scheme to "No Sounds".


I've traveled a few times with my notebook PC with the Echo card, and I haven't noticed any discernable difference in battery life, though this may vary with different PCs, with different hardware and differing effects of Windows Power Management functions. With everything turned up, no default stand-by modes, my screen at full brightness, and the Echo powered, I get ~2 hours per battery (Lithium-Ion), the same as I got using my old sound device.

As for being "hot to the touch"...that reviewer may have had a notebook PC that ran hot overall, but mine doesn't, and my Echo Indigo is only warm to the touch when I pull it out after being powered for many hours. The part that sticks out when it's connected doesn't even feel warm while operating.


I suspect there will be no portable player with the same quality of processing and output stage (APU, DAC, opamp) as the Echo Indigo. However, there are portables with very acceptable sound quality, which would probably be comparable to the sound quality of your PC's standard sound device. I recommend trying a few and find out what sounds the best to you. I use my Echo to drive my Sennheiser HD-590's with no external amp, with very good results. When you try out portable players, take your Etymotics 'phones with you to see how they perform with no external amp, but you may find that a portable headphone amp is worth the investment after all. I use a Xin Super Mini between my portable MP3 player and either my Grado SR-80's, Sennheiser MX-500's or Sony MDR-ED228's, but there are other equally high-quality amps out there as well.

Also, I don't know if you've already bought an Echo Indigo yet, but here is a review of the Indigo I did a few weeks ago.

One of the reasons I like WinAmp 2.x is because it has a very low CPU overhead, I have an older IBM Thinkpad and its Ok sound wise as long as I dont use the built in speakers

I thought I should mention the MAD plugin for Winamp - that might improve your audio a bit and there is also the DFX addon which if you like messing around with the sound can really do some interesting things.