If you're using a headphone amp, you shouldn't be having problems
with things like impedance or gain, or frequency response.
Really, it's just a question of quality. A Macbook is marketed as
a multimedia machine, but it's not audiophile grade by my terms.
The components and design of the sound card in a laptop or any
consumer-grade sound card are chosen to meet a price point which
will satisfy most people. By definition, everyone on this list
has a much higher set of standards on the bell curve; we're
probably the pickiest 1% of consumers. So increasing the product
cost to satisfy us is economically infeasible for a computer
manufacturer. I'm surprised at the lack of true audiophile
portable music players, however, but I haven't researched
recently. I should add, however, that some computer-based pro
musician's gear definitely achieves quality that should be of
interest to audiophiles, particularly as commonly available DAC
chips improve, and the pricing for pro-gear is much more
competitive than audiophile stuff. This is because there is a
large demographic of musicians with average or below average
disposable income, so the sales are higher with smaller margins.

If you want to really improve the sound quality from your
computer, look into an external DAC and be sure to feed it
lossless audio. Some DACs have headphone amps built in, and can
be had for less than what I'd expect to pay for a decent CD
player.
Here are where the headphone enthusiasts are, and of course
there's lots of discussion about portable audio and DACs and
portable music players etc.
http://www.head-fi.org/

This is where the digital audio enthusiasts are. This is focusing
more on software, encoding, digital music production etc. Here's
the FAQs:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=7516
I highly recommend that everyone should know about EAC, a program
which extracts music properly from a CD for your portable usage.
It's linked from the FAQs above.

Cheers,
Anthony



On Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:59 +0000, "rajeevmullick"
<rajeev.mullick@...> wrote:

I have a Macbook. And I have very new AKG 701 headphones along
with a headphone amp. And I guess the combo is ok. But I can't
help but feel that the Macbook is limiting my auditory experience
in some physics-explicable way.
What are the thoughts on this? I guess I'm looking for things
like impedance, amplification, Hz and such.
RM


References

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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/toronto-audiophiles/message/14061;_ylc=X3oDMTM2cWJ\
ldnVuBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzEwMTc4MTYEZ3Jwc3BJZAMxNzA1MDE3NTYzBG1zZ0lkAzE0MDY\
xBHNlYwNmdHIEc2xrA3Z0cGMEc3RpbWUDMTI0NDQ3NjgxNwR0cGNJZAMxNDA2MQ--
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dHIEc2xrA3JwbHkEc3RpbWUDMTI0NDQ3NjgxNw--?act=reply&messageNum=14061
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