Live-act With Laptop-soundcard

Hello,
a question to all of you who make a live act with a laptop. Do you use the internal soundcard of the laptop or do you use an external soundcard? I only need one output (and no ins), but I wonder if the quality of the internal soundcard is enough for playing live generally?

i don’t think using the internal soundcard is such a great idea… of course, it depends on the laptop, but my experience is that hum, hiss and “clicking” is a common problem, and this might be even worse live as power circuits are different from place to place, but that might not be a problem if the laptop is grounded properly (?)

i haven’t started playing live myself yet, but i would recommend looking into something like this:
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Transit.html

simple and quite cheap solution :)

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad, the internal soundcard is passable in quality. If you are with a clean installation of the OS, meaning no bloatware & proper and up-to-date drivers for your hardware, you should not have any trouble. I will also reiterate on proper grounding.

Of course you will get better quality with a proper soundcard. I am using Echo Indigo IO and I’m loving it. :) Perfect solution for high quality sound on a laptop. Check the Indigos out, highly recommended:

http://www.echoaudio.com/Products/ExpressCard/index.php

Some internal cards have quite high hiss/noise in the out which in turn gets amplified in PA and may be pretty horrible.

Also most interesting thing to remember: If you get loud weird noise (whining sounds) in PA, disconnect laptop powersupply and run on batteries. This should eliminate the noise. Most laptops can handle one gig on batteries, just make sure your batteries are fully loaded.

Thank you all for you tips.
I will try when I got the laptop. I tend to buy a soundcard though. As I have zero money atm I will look for a Behringer UCA222.
http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/UCA222.aspx

I think this would be enough to avoid the risk to have bad soundquality. Later on I could upgrade the card…