Laptop 'headphone-out' connected to a monitor amp: any potential problems?

[teainthesahara]

I've been working on a project lately where i'm stuck with using an older laptop. This thing does not have a line out, but only a headphone jack to output the audio. My question is, will hooking up my monitor amplfier to the headphone jack (using a stereo to 1/4 mono Y-cable) cause any damage to the amp?

Thanks,
T

 

[pundit]

The impedance of the amplifiers line input will be much higher than a pair of headphones so damaging the laptop output, or the amp input itself, shouldn't be a problem if you're sensible.

Of course the level provided by the laptops headphone output should give you more than enough signal! Just make sure you keep the level down in the beginning and bring it up slowly to avoid clipping the amp.

Also don't expect either great sound quality and low noise when monitoring from a laptops analog audio output. Computers are inherently noisy environments for carrying out AD/DA conversion and laptops with their cramped electronics are generally worse than even desktops in this situation. Some kind of external PCMCIA or USB AD/DA audio interface could be worthwhile if you want to maintain resonable audio quality.

Cheers

 

[Chris Shaeffer]

I've done just that for years and had no problems with it. Its too bad no one is making laptops with even half decent convertors and line ins and outs.

Headphone out works, though. I was always somewhat suspicious of the sound quality, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Take care,
Chris

 

[teainthesahara]

Thanks pundit and Chris for your responses!
I'll keep an eye on the levels and won't worry about it so much.
And, yup, for sure, I can hear a slight sound quality difference (for the worse) when using the headphone jack method with my monitor set-up.

T

 

[Tomcat]

I'm not claiming this will give you great pristine sound, but I got a SB Extigy to use with my laptop. It connects to the usb port and is certainly a lot better than the ESS Allegro chip on the motherboard inside the laptop. It also has midi connectors, TOSLINK connectors, a coax sp/dif connector; the digital connectors go thru the usb and don't use the sound card part. However, at this point I strictly use it for playback and not for recording. I record on a Korg D1600 and then export a wave file into the laptop, edit/master/finalize in Sound Forge 6 and then burn to CD using EZ CD Creator in Disk At Once mode. Also, the Extigy has 5.1 surround sound output, if you want it.

Tom