Re: Line-in jacks in MONO?

It's not copy protection, it's cost-cutting. The Mic in jack is mic in, it's not intended to be "line-in", which most laptops do not have. The solution is an add-on sound card. Both USB and PC Card sound cards are available that have a full range of I/O's, and also much better sound quality (the inside of a laptop is electrically noisy and is a bad place to do A-to-D conversion of low-level audio signals).


Fr@nk wrote:

I was really decided on buying a particular HP laptop when by chance I
glanced at its service manual online. The mic-in (audio-in) jack is MONO
(monaural); not stereo! I checked a couple of other HP laptops' manuals too,
and some others (including their high-end 17" P4 model) also have a monaural
audio-in jack. I couldn't believe it.

I looked at Sony's site and saw mono line-in jacks there too! That's when it
hit me: this must be some kind of copy-protection-thwarting attempt. That's
always an easy workaround to whatever DRM the companies come up with
(they're talking about copy-protecting plain old audio CDs now)....just play
the CD on an external device and record its (analog) audio directly into the
computer.

Having a mono input jack may discourage some people, as they probably won't
be able to tell why their "recording" of their CD doesn't sound right (maybe
it's only recording the Left channel??). Of course, this would only drive
people (myself included) to buy a decent sound interface (probably PCMCIA)
to record into.

Anyone know why some companies are penny-pinching to the extreme with these
mono audio-in jacks? I can't imagine it saves more than a few cents.

Better yet, anyone have one of these laptops whose specs say the jack is
MONO but actually can record analog audio in stereo? Just wondering.


Fr@nk


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: No sound from Line In
    ... Connect one end of the cable to the speaker output jack (lime) ... Go to the Control Panel and start the Sound and Audio Devices applet. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: CD player does not send output to sound card
    ... Whenever I put an audio CD in there, ... > the hard disk, the sound comes OK. ... > into the headphone jack of the CD ROM drive. ... for linux you still need the analog cable. ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: 7.1 onboard sound speaker question
    ... The motherboard audio outputs AND soundcards ONLY put out a LOW-LEVEL audio ... computers require the use of POWERED speakers, ... >seems the only channel to get sound from a passive or nonamplified speaker ... >is the front jack, plugging the passive speakers into any of the other ...
    (rec.audio.misc)
  • Dell latitude D500 Audio
    ... We have D500 laptops running xp pro, and sigmatel audio is the sound ... Sigmatel internal sound card ...
    (comp.sys.laptops)
  • Re: Sound disappear from Speaker after using headphone
    ... The headphone was connected to the speaker and the headphone of course was ... think any other settings which might affect where the sound come from will ... sounds over to the headphone when they are connected to the jack. ... If you have used the audio jack that may exist on the CD/DVD drive, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)