Need Advice on Purchasing Speakers

[charlie_howarth]

I have a laptop and therefore the onboard speakers are not very good. I have connected to it an iPod speaker through the headphone socket, which is an improvement. However, even this isn't brilliant.

I am looking to buy some proper surround sound speakers. However, my laptop only has one sound output socket for headphones and, as far as I know, most "proper" speakers need two for left and right.

I've looked into getting USB speakers but as far as I can see they tend to be low range and low quality.

Can anyone help?

 

[computerhakk]

Another route that you can take is to get a PCMCIA sound card (assuming that your laptop has this slot), much like those used in regular desktop pc's, just made for laptop use instead. The onboard sound cards on laptops aren't really that great to begin with unless they are gaming laptops; even then, the quality of some aren't still that good.

As far as the speaker goes, you'll need a good sound card to hear good quality sound from a set of surround sound speakers also. If you plan to use surround sound speakers on something like onboard laptop sound cards, the effect probably wont be too different.