Hi all,

What would be the best way to get a decent sound from a Powerbook laptop computer? I guess you cannot change the soundcard, so the possible options are:

Buying an amplifier and then hook it to speakers
or just buying good quality speakers and connecting them to the computer directly.

As for the speakers, does anyone know if computer-designed ones would work better than stereo speakers of the same price range? I cannot afford anything above $150-250.

I also wonder whether the output audio jack is good enough to get decent sound.

For a period of a year or so I will only have this laptop computer at home. It will be the only way to listen to my music collection. So, even if i know that it is not the ideal system por playback, I will have to put up with it and make it work as well as possible.

Any comments or help most welcome!

This thing is very cool: Griffin Powerwave. There are other solutions which I am sure others will bring up (like the M-Audio Sonica Theater) but this is cool because it has a built in amplifier (10W per channel should be plenty unless you really pump your music).

Thank you for the information!! So I would have to add a pair of stereo speakers. Does anyone know if the apple pro speakers do well? If they are not suitable for listening to music at home on a regular basis they could still come in handy when travelling etc. so maybe buying them at first would be a good idea. Do you agree?

The Apple Pro speakers are pretty tinny sounding, IMO. Plus, you have to use Griffin's adapter to use them with a PowerBook....only desktop G4's have the required amplified speaker jack (which is proprietary).

The PowerBook's audio output is actually pretty decent, but I would recommend getting a firewire or USB soundcard and then connecting a nice pair of bookshelf monitors or running the output to your stereo (which is what I usually have done).

MacWorld had a review of speaker options a while back....if I can dig up the article, I'll post it here for you. All I remember is that "SoundSticks" aren't very good, and the Apple Pro speakers aren't worth the extra money for an adapter.