Crank it!

[Queso]

I listen to a lot of music thru last.fm on this laptop of mine and the soundcard in it sucks.

Is there any way I can turn up the output gain?

 

The website just has a volume bar. Is there a program out there or something?

[Buffy]

I suppose you could figure out how to wire a couple of Marshall Heads in between the sound card and the built-in 1-inch speakers on the laptop. It would certainly increase your gain, but I doubt it would sound very good--even for the first 0.2 seconds before the Marshall's shredded the little speakers into oblivion....

 

No, seriously, on laptops, the sound circuits are built into the motherboard, so there's no hope. You can however find some high-end laptops that have very nice sound hardware in them, but you'd still need an external amp and some decent speakers if you want it to sound any good....

 

Turn it down to 11, :warped:

Buffy

[Queso]

haha spinal tap.

I have some great studio monitors that bump my tunes, but the output volume is just so low when it comes out of the laptop. (my digi002r cranks out some very loud sounds, so I know my monitors are capable.)

 

there's no way to boost it with software?

[Buffy]

there's no way to boost it with software?

 

Most sound editing programs do have a function that will increase the volume of a recorded file (assuming they read the file type you have!), but this is an editing step.

 

Basically your program is going to feed the wave into the sound driver at whatever amplitude is in that file, and the sound driver (board) is going to have a range of volume boost it can do, but there's no such thing--as far as I know--to put a "pre-amp" in between the two...

 

Marshall actually did produce heads with an "11" setting on the volume knob, and the line "turn it down to 10" (mixed metaphors at work! :snow: ) goes back at least to the 70's...

 

You don't do heavy metal in Dubly, you know,

Buffy

[Queso]

hmmmm...

 

winamp has a preamp knob and I use it to boost the signal of mp3's, but when I'm listening to internet radio I just can't blast it.

 

aye.

[CraigD]

Other than curing a problem causing your volume control to be setting your soundcard’s volume register to less than 100% (make sure to open every volume control app you can find, and make sure you don’t have something turned down), software can’t give you more volume - all it can do is turn your soundcard to 100%, which it’s probably already doing. You likely wouldn’t want it to if it could, as all that would do is possibly hurt your laptop’s built in speakers – which, if they’re anything like mine’s, would transform them from merely crappy to profoundly crappy sound quality.

 

Your laptop almost certainly has a mini headphone jack on some edge. Stick into said jack the plug of pretty much any amplified PC speaker kit that can be found at pretty much any store with any electronics section (even grocery stores tend to have at least a crappy little Labtech 2 + subwoofer set), plug the speaker’s power plug into a wall outlet, and you should be able to crank reasonable well (most kits I’ve seen these days have a nice fat volume knob on a cord from the speaker amp.

 

If you’re committed to keeping your laptop portable, obviously connecting it to a big subwoofer that plugs into a wall outlet poses some problems. I’ve a very old pair of speakers with no subwoofer that can run on built-in C-cell batteries – about the only use they get is running a little MP3 keyfob player in the event of a need for tunes during a power failure that outlasts my houses UPSs - and suspect you can still buy such things for cheap somewhere, though it might take some looking.

 

If you’re looking for loudness in you own ears only, there are several battery (usually 2 or 4 * AAA) powered in-line amps for headphones, and headphones with their own built-in battery amps, running anywhere from $25 from Radioshack to several $100 for iPod-ophile models. The high-end ones usually plug into the USB port, in addition to/instead of the headphone jack, installing themselves as a replacement soundcard, which can be an improvement, though potentially a mess-up-your-sound-setup threat.

 

In short, you shouldn’t have much trouble walking into any marginally competently staffed electronics store and walking out with a reasonably cheap but loud crank it solution.