On Fri Mar 09, 2007 at 07:43:00PM -1000, david wrote: everything is made by Compal, Quanta, and ASUS. can you really discriminate by western "brand" ? if Apple is selling a notebook for $1099 and HP is selling the same thing for $599, i'd get the HP - call me crazy

On Sat Mar 10, 2007 at 01:47:13PM -0500, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki wrote: ~ i have the same issue with my MSI 'whitebook' - its even more obscure than ASUS as far as DIY notebooks go - nobody has 4-cell white batteries. so im stuck with the giant battery that sticks out the back, or a zebra-looking thing. luckily the AC adaptor is incredibly common and i just picked one up from LiteOn when the included one shorted out internally (it had an inner conductor surrounded by an outer conductor and a tiny insulator which cracked under stress causing the cable to melt.. im still glad i went with the whitebook though. it was about half the price of a macbook pro with the same specs, and still a nice metal case... plus it has a row of pageup/down/home/end keys on the right edge i cant imagine going without for any extended irssi/firefox/manpage paging..

On 3/10/07, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki <eric(a)zhevny.com> wrote: I doubt it - it sounds like your laptop vendor used cheap noisy capacitors. Lee

On Sat, Mar 10, 2007 at 11:56:32AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote: I'll try that. Thanks for the suggestions ... not holding out much hope though. -Eric Rz.

On Sat, Mar 10, 2007 at 04:21:47PM -0500, carmen wrote: The edirol ua-25 should be a decent device, no? pcmcia is just not cost effective and there only a few choices anyway. I guess for my purposes, I'll be unlikely to ever need to do audio with the laptop in public for longer than the battery life, so I'll live. And I have a delta 66 in my studio PC for working at home. It's 3-pronged. -Eric Rz.

Greetings: Not sure if anyone mentioned this: Have you checked each mixer channel for noise ? I've found that the CD channel and another channel (AC97?) on my SBLive mixer produce an incredible amount of noise that disappears entirely when those channels are muted. I don't know what channels you have available on your audio chipset's mixer, but you should check each one for noise. CD channels seem to always produce much noise, probably due to the cheap drives I buy. Best, dp

I solved the noiseproblem with balanced/ symmetrical audio cables together with card and mixer with symmetrical connectors, in this case a Hammerfall Multiface and a big mixer but some of the small ones like Tapco and Behringer should have balanced inputs too, I know that the small Yamaha Mixers dont. Cheers, Malte -- Malte Steiner media art + development -www.block4.com-

On 3/12/07, M P Smoak <smoak(a)mis.net> wrote: But are the outputs to the computer balanced? I'm pretty sure the main outs on the UB802 are not balanced.

On 3/10/07, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki <eric(a)zhevny.com> wrote: Possibly it's a ground loop. Sometimes, reversing power plug (i.e. swapping zero and phase pins) of the offending device (in your case either one monitor or the laptop) helps. Dmitry.

Hi, My definite solution for such a noise on my old ASUS L2000D was simply to not provide the computer with its earth connection when plugged. I first used a tiny piece of plastic bag to isolate the earth connection from the pin of the wall plug to the mains cable but eventually I built a custom mains cable (connection from wall plug to switching power supply box) with earth pin not connected. I do not have anymore noise in audio output (I used to have in both internal chipset and USB interface...) Hope it works for you and you're not too concerned about strict electrical security (-: ++ Jé Eric Dantan Rzewnicki a écrit :

david wrote: If you're in the habit of occasionally challenging your preconceptions do this little experiment: Visit Dell, just for convenience - or pick another if you wish, and configure a laptop with the same features and specs as a MacBook Pro - ignore the elegance of the OS and its heart of BSD...even ignore the simplicity and speed with which it runs multiple GNU/Linux distros in nothing more difficult or risky than a simple file constituting a Parallels Desktop VM, and get back to us with either a verification of your comparison factor or a new-found appreciation for the value of opinions based upon verifiable facts. Frank

On Saturday 10 March 2007 11:50 pm, david wrote: I drive used cars. And I'm starting to think that may be a good strategy to use with computers. HP, I'd have a bias because of all the HP stuff I used in the 70's. IBM; I spent many years there. Recently bought a used thinkpad. Installing linux for travel with audio. So far so good on getting it going but I'm moving slow due to ... other energy drags and no chance to travel. My wifes experience with a dell laptop, and my reseach of their known problems with sound, makes me think I'd never buy one. I started doing techi stuff back in the 60's; seen a lot of change in computing and music/audio. The pace of change in hardware and computing methods is both fascinating and scary today. We're sailing in a tide with lots of coral and swirls. For now I'll take an "old, outdated system" that works for me rather than the latest, greatest. But I'm just a sax player, ex-tech geek, who just wants music to work via my computer. Marv PS: My new mouse just ate my alsa sound on Songbird.

On Sat Mar 10, 2007 at 06:50:47PM -1000, david wrote: both thinkpads i had fell apart after a year of use. the a21m was particularly bad, with the network card, usb ports, power plug, cd drive, and eventually screen backlight failing.

david wrote: Sorry David, we're not talking about the same thing, and I don't mean to appear on a mission here. I reflexively dismissed Macintosh on the grounds of high cost due to marketing profile and practices of the single-source supplier. I also didn't like OS 9. When the Intel/OS X sun rose I saw things in a somewhat different light. Parallels Desktop took me to the Apple store. Having read an analysis - it should be easy enough to find on the Internet, by admittedly a Mac fanboy challenging the "common wisdom" of premium price, actually item-by-item illustrated price parity. No hysteria, no opinion, no evangelistic blindness. Dollars, cents and sense. I hopped onto Dells Web site and configured one of their XPS laptops as close to my MacBook Pro, Core 2 Duo @ 2.16 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 120 GB drive, 15.4 cinema ratio screen, all-everything optical drive, extreme airport wireless, Bluetooth, digital audio input, USB 2, IEEE1394 400 and 800, etc. The Dell was more expensive. A freaking Dell. Both were with my educator's discount - with the white MacBook, slower processor and smaller drive, but all the other goodies coming in at $1049, and the absolutely, positively, ass-kicking MacBook Pro that I chose running $1799. Yeah, that's a pile of bucks but it's a remarkably sophisticated and dignified computer. (I backed up to add the previous paragraph, so momentarily going back to what I've already alluded to...and you haven't read yet - my Dell 470 workstation with 2 3.0GHz Xeons, gig of RAM, 2 10,000 RPM Segate SCSI drives in RAID array, nVidia workstation graphics, premium audio, 19" digital panel, etc. was around 3 grand! Not boasting here. Did I mention education? I didn't mention my 1996 Jeep. Some people spend their disposable income one way, some spend it other ways. I spend my meager portion on creative tools that give me great pleasure and make me as productive as I'm able to be.) Again, that's without the 1" aluminum case completely devoid of bullshit keys, buttons, flashing lights, fins, air scoops, whatever. Also, that's with, what's it called...Windows, and again ignoring the Mac's highly refined OS X and its BSD underpinnings. For someone coming from nearly exclusive use of GNU/Linux including extensive application development projects for school - since 1998 - I felt unexpectedly at home, right out of the box. Then I installed Parallels Desktop! I immediately dropped several distros into VMs - which as I mentioned are nothing more than a file of a couple gigs size. Didn't like Ubuntu? Delete the file. Wanna try something on the spur of a moment? Don't want to further sub-divide your hard drive? Partitions a pain? Three or four clicks and you've got another VM up with the installer of another OS right in front of you. My long-awaited copy of the Solaris 10 kit arrived in the mail last week. Three or four clicks (though an inordinate period of filesystem activity) and I was looking at the Java desktop. I even dropped my XP Pro SP2 and Office 2003 that came with this Dell 470 SMP workstation I'm writing from, and both phoned home and were activated uneventfully. Coherence mode in Parallels supports running a single Windows app directly from an icon having it appear right on the Mac desktop looking like a native program. Wanna blow a few more minds than you accomplished with that last trick? Run the whole damned black-kingdom OS in coherence! Look - up at the top...what's that? The OS X task bar. Look - down at the bottom...what's that? The Windows task bar. Launch applications from one, the other, both. Sorry to ramble here, and did I say I didn't want to sound on a mission? I could simply have said: "Actually, with all the high-end attributes of the current Mac laptop line, feature-for-feature they're about the same price as a typical PC." I could have added they're a great choice for a user dwelling under a Unix class star (Linus!). Frank

Lee Revell wrote: At least it didn't set your house on fire! (Google search for "Dell laptop house fire" or something like that ... ) -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community