Why difference in sound quality ?

[wpshooter]

I found the following elsewhere on the Internet:

"If you are looking for quality sound, again a desktop computer wins out over a laptop computer. Even if you purchase extra speakers for a laptop, the quality of sound produced from such computers is no where near as good as the sound produced from desktop computers. In fact, the sound from a laptop computer is not even remotely close to the sound quality that is emitted from a desktop computer."

My question is WHY (what factors) is the sound quality of the laptop so inferior to that of the desktop computer, i.e. is it strictly a hardware problem or are there software issues also involved.

Thanks.

 

[Ken g6]

(Uncompressed) digital audio is digital audio. If you add, say, a USB S/PDIF output to a laptop, and use that for your speakers, audio quality should be identical to a desktop using S/PDIF. (But Bluetooth, for instance, does lossy compression.)

Of course, digital audio eventually has to be converted to analog, and at that point it's all about that DAC. I imagine the packing of components may make it harder to filter out noise from a laptop's internal DAC than from a desktop, particularly a desktop with a discrete sound card.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Short answer: it's a lie. Fake news.

Like Ken said, it's harder to shield the analog out of a laptop from RF noise generated by all of the other components. Harder, but not impossible. A laptop might or might not have more noise / hiss from its headphone out jack than a desktop. I have a $50 Fire tablet where the analog out sounds just as good as my iPod and desktop PC.

If you use the HDMI connection or a USB to optical "sound card" then your laptop sends digital audio that is identical to the audio from a desktop. The 0s and 1s are not affected by the RF noise.

What is true is that some motherboards and sound cards include software to mess with the sound in ways that some people like better than the pure audio. Filters / effects that they like does not make the audio better in general it just changes it in ways that they prefer.

 

[HutchinsonJC]

That person doesn't know what they are talking about.

Realistically, I'd say most people would be hard pressed to tell a difference from one on-board sound solution to another these days. They've improved pretty dramatically over the last couple of decades.

Shielding can make a difference in what you hear, as above mentioned. Say for example with Laptops, it's quite possible many of them on the cheaper side you'll hear some kind of wirr, beeps or pulses depending on what you're doing on the laptop. This will be most noticeable with a good set of headphones. I had a laptop that every time you did anything on it that put some stress on the graphics card, there would be an obvious, but very low volume, high pitch wirr that you could hear.

The other thing that can often be a noticeable difference between desktops and laptops in the general scheme of things, is the headphone jack's power output capability. If you have a really nice set of headphones capable of producing some really nice bass, but a headphone jack that's not able to output the power required by the headphones, you'll definitely hear this difference. But this is just when looking at Desktops and Laptops in a general comparison, as this is not a hard rule that laptops aren't capable of higher output power on the headphone jack.

There are laptops that offer good shielding, and good power output on the headphone jack.

There are also a lot of headphones that run on a couple of batteries to supply their own power hungry demands, which can often render the jack's power output capability somewhat moot.