Hang on, shouldn’t the audio information be part of the music wave itself if that’s what the composer intended? Or at least part of the music player, so you could alter the sound quality in Winamp or Mediamonkey etc.
Having a distorted signal at the lowest level (the speakers) really seems backwards (even if it ‘improves’ the sound sometimes). Speakers should always aim foremost to reproduce the sound signal exactly. I rarely hear that said though… 
Unless you are using high quality studio referense monitors, your speakers always distort the signal, thats inevitable. Thats especially true with cheap, small multimedia speakers.
So true vV…The very sad thing is, before actually buying the stuff from IKEA, I had made the serious decision that I’d never ever want to assemble a kitchen on my own. But then the other manufacturers would take too long to deliver the kitchen…which would still have paid in the end as I see now but I grow slowly. I have to do all the possible mistakes one can do until I finally learn to do it right. So I did with the kitchen.
Just as Weird Energy said, it’s not like that with HiFi-equipment because it’s not meant to be a reference.
It’s just usual that any consumer amp/speaker colors the sound. Even expensive equipment (Bose, Kenwood) does that. You’ll notice often on “better” hifi and car audio systems that low volume comes with high bass and high volume lacks having bass. On the one hand this is the “loudness” option, which boosts the bass on low volume so you can still enjoy it. On the other hand it prevents from overdriving the amp on high volumes, so you don’t hear any distortion. On most built-in cellphone speaker-outputs you’ll also notice a compressor pumping the volume down when a BD kicks in. Also to prevent distortion, which is still a preferable sound actually. If you, as a musician, compose your music on reference monitors, then it’s supposed to sound “fine” on all of these systems anyway.
true. of course, I did not think I could mix or master on these, I just wanted some ok speakers for the road, but the bass enhancer on these speakers are so over-excited that I acutally can’t even ENJOY playback of my productions. example: a tight minimal tech-house tune sounds like a bad hard-house attempt.
but I found I might can use these after all: if I put a 20db cut on everything below 70-80 hz on the master channel in renoise, it logically sounds more “realistic” 
maybe I can even find some app for windows making this cut on all playback. I’d like to be able to use these speakers, cus they are so god damn neat, practically speaking.
thanks for the input.
For Windows on Sony Vaio notebooks there’s a tool from SonicStage that would enable you to do exactly this. You can choose an audio program (e.g. Renoise) where the tool would hook itsel into its soundstream. Then you can load any VSTs (e.g. an EQ) to manipulate the sound in realtime.
Or you can have a look in your soundcard driver’s tools. Maybe you’ll find some AC97 tool that’ll let you tweak the sound. For precise eqing chances are low though mostly.
On Linux life is easier for these games. You can either use the JACK audio driver which can then route Renoise’s sound through Jack PlugIns like JAmin. Or, when using ALSA, you can edit a file called .asoundrc where you can route the systemwide sound through LADSPA plugins (e.g. an EQ).
But I didn’t buy a PC, I bought an IMac. If I had bought a $10 PC from 1995 I would have still been able to run a tracker. The biggest problem really was that there was no tracker compatable with any OS before OSX, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have even made the previous post
M-Audio Ozonic: Bought as a first controller with the idea that when/if I migrate to a laptop I can use it’s built in firewire audio interface until I feel I need to/can afford to upgrade. Unfortunately I discovered it’s a massive resource hog when connected by firewire, even if you have all the audio interface option disabled. Have only been able to use it via MIDI (which is fine really as I still haven’t got a laptop.)
Behringer BCR2000 from Turnkey: Sure the controller would of been fine if it worked, this is more a complaint about Turnkey then the product. Arrive dead. Over the next year I made about 500 phone calls and send over 100 emails trying to get them to do something about it but it’s still sat on my shelf, busted and now out of warranty. Now the warranty has expired maybe I’ll get around to taking it apart and trying to fix it myself.
EnergyXT: Seemed a good program but I never got around to actually doing a project in it. Don’t really regret it too much though, as it is a bargain piece of software and sure I’ll pick it up at some point in the future…
I bought Diablo thinking it was a guitar simulator. Man was I wrong 
… I also lived to regret my father purchasing a Roland mc-50. DON’T EVER LET A PARENT BUY ONE OF THESE… ESPECIALLY IF HE SINGS COUNTRY MUSIC, AND DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO OPERATE A COMPUTER.
When it comes to audio, chordless headphones from Sennheiser was without doubt my worst buy ever. I later sold the headphones worth 350€ for 10€. Useless piece of shit ripoff.
But what takes the cake was a WLAN-set when it was hip and new. 500€ for badly or non-working hardware. Never managed to even sell the junk
Old equipment = makes great stage or video props if you know what you’re doing with them 
Roland SP-555 (Sampler…?). What a piece of crap!! I will never again buy Roland stuff. (… ehhr. maybe a 303 
)
And…Microsoft, Please go to hell and die. (Thank you lord for not letting me pay for their crap)
My €600+ Ecler HAK-360 battle mixer: the so called ‘Eternal Fader’ broke on me twice in a year. The crossfader has 5 year warranty but fuck it, I keep on using my €300,- Vestax.
My first FireWire audio interface: Behringer [blabla] 202. What a piece of crap. Audio dropouts and clipping all the time. It still lies around here somewhere, I just can’t sell it, I don’t want it to annoy the hell out of someone else.
Sony Vaio Laptop.
Absolute shit.
3 mobile phone (worst company ever to exist)
Sorry to be bringing this one back to life after nearly a year but I noticed a few serious anti Sony Viao rants.
Have been looking for a new laptop recently as I’m often away from home and have been considering one of the fairly new viao cw’s. Small, quite powerful and they feel well built. Would vader, crytek or anyone else mind expanding on what was wrong with theirs and which specific models they had?
Might save me making a bad choice or help me investigate current models with a bit more of a clue what to ask owners.
Any other laptop reccomendations appreciated.
I’ve never owned a Vaio, but since it’s been the choice of many laptop artists I’ve met, I’m familiar with their complaints 
CD-ROM players breaking, internal memory breaking, fried harddiscs, smashed keyboards… terrible service, little customer communication.
GET A TOSHIBA! Those things are almost unbreakable… Took me 6 years and 2 tours to break my first one… Current laptop’s in its 7th year, never had a problem with it yet!
Toshiba had a good reputation… The 400 series were definately pretty indestructable, but after the 480, things went downhill from there. They wasted it terribly with their 6xxx and 9xxx series. But the last time i ever repaired a Toshiba was in 2006. Hopefully they have regained back their original good name with better series since then…
If you’re interested in today’s Laptop reliability, check this out!
http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareT…bility_1109.pdf
Basicly, Toshiba and Asus come out best. HP is the worst.
That is one thing that has been a fact for over a decade now… I had to repair their omnibooks since the 1500 series but these things really break down the most. Not the small silly things that are easily replacable, but mainboards… and you had to watch carefully after replacing, you had to check the bios if the harddisk encryption was turned off before placing the original harddriv back else your customer would loose all his data.
Damn, if there is one solid advise i can give is to void HP notebooks at all times. (Nowadays the old Compaq team is designing them, but they are also crap)
This has certainly given me more to think about. I notice sony come ok on in that squaretrade test. Something to do with their sampling or do are they a bit more reliable these days?
I’m also looking at the lower end of lenovo and some toshiba machines. Part of what attracted me to the sony cw was the size and portability and (embarrassed to admit this) part of it was the passable discreet graphics card. I can re jig my desktop as a bit more of a games machine but it still had an appeal.
Lenovo = IBM. I have no idea why Lenovo wants to elevate on IBM’s hardware. But whenever i see a Lenovo Thinkpad, it is just an IBM Thinkpad. The only difference is the Bios logo and perhaps the Windows wallpaper but nothing more. If you have to choose to pick between those two brands, i would definately pick the cheaper offer.