How to improve your laptop's sound

External soundcards
Many of these interfaces are duplicated on external soundcards, so why should you upgrade? Well, you should get better sound quality. It’s easy to find an external soundcard with a better chipset and isolating the audio hardware from the electromagnetic noise is a good thing.

Many external soundcards are portable enough to be part of a mobile system and you’ll be able to connect more audio equipment using a wider range of interfaces. The breakout box makes it easy to access, too.

Consider what you want to do before buying. Do you simply want to record speech ­ or audio from pre-recorded sources? If so, will you stick to hi-fi audio-only sources such as DVDs, CDs and turntables? Do you want to make your PC part of your home audio setup? Or do you want to make and perform your own music on your laptop? See the pdf 'audiokit' which shows a table that will give you an idea of what you want to do, what you’ll need and what it’ll cost.

The choice is huge. For £19.99 (£16.99 on Amazon with free delivery) you can pick up the very compact Terratec USB2 Aureon dual USB. This offers a stereo digital out with an optical converter and microphone, which is useful if you want to add or improve the audio function on your laptop or netbook.

It can also add a little audio spice to working life; just plug it in to play music on corporate PCs that have the sound disabled. Look at the M-Audio Transit (priced at £59) for better 24-bit, 96KHz recording from external sources and line/headphone output.

One step up and you’ll find products designed for gaming and home entertainment, such as the Sweex External Sound Card 5.1 (£16.66 online) or the Trust Sound Expert 510EX USB 5.1 (from less than £25 online), which offers the basic interfaces via a better chipset.

The 5.1 surround-sound support means you can connect a set of home-entertainment speakers for audio playback. Express Card products such as the Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Notebook Wireless (£61) are more portable. For a really portable, high-quality external soundcard, with the ASIO drivers needed for many software applications, the Edirol UA-1EX at £59.99 is hard to beat.

Along with Edirol, specialist audio companies such as M-Audio, Edirol, Motu and Lexicon produce the best products in this area. Higher prices are usually affected by the type and number of interfaces, analogue or digital Midi, better processors and chipsets, and professional features such as direct hardware monitoring and low latency.

Good ranges are available ­ M-Audio’s starts at the lower end with the Mobilepre USB for £119. With two onboard microphone/instrument preamps, it’s suited to field recording, sampling and voice recording.

The Lexicon Lambda USB Desktop Studio (£129 from Dolphin Music) is a similar product, which is less portable, but includes a Midi interface and a nice software bundle. Both have good-quality microphone inputs to add a touch of class if you’re making your own podcasts.

If you’d rather use Firewire instead of USB2 though have a look at the Motu Ultralite-mk3. At around £500 it offers two microphone/instrument inputs, six line-level analogue inputs, 10 analogue outputs and S/PDIF in a very hard-wearing case.

Once you’ve set a budget and decided what kind of audio you want to capture and what you want to connect, go to www.avforums.com. You’ll find useful discussions there on features, product capabilities and people’s experiences.