does anyone know if there is a way to connect your notebook to a stereo/ home entertainment system?  if anyone has any info on doing so i would be interested.  what inputs and outputs would be required…and so on.  has anyone ever done this in the past with any of their laptops.

I’ve done this quite a bit in the past, and currently have a machine hooked up to the stereo as an mp3 server. Anyway, all you’ll need is a simple Y-cable, one end of which plugs into the headphone jack/speaker out on your computer, and the other end plugs into a spare input on the back of your stereo/receiver.

thanks.  that was exactly what i was looking for, playing mp3 files.  is the quality fairly decent?

Yeah, the quality is good, the signal sent to the stereo is the same one sent to headphones or speakers, so it’s fine. The cable’s about $5, you can find it at Radio Shack, Best Buy, Circuit City, or Target.

good.  thanks a lot for all the info.

If you need a better quality cable, you shouldn’t be listening to your music in MP3 format. 

Doh! Good one….unless you’re insane and encode your MP3s at a really constant or variable high bit rate.

Even though it’s proprietary…I like the sound of Sony’s ATRAC3+ codec. It’s far better than MP3 at similar bit rates. Oddly enough, I think Sharp’s ATRAC implementation is better than Sony’s…

Ha, put me down as one of the crazy high-bitrate encoders. I encode all my mp3s at 320 kbps, and can definitely tell the difference from a 128 kbps file. Space isn’t really a concern since I have a 15GB iPod, but the battery life isn’t so hot since the hard drive has to spin up more often due to fewer songs fitting in the buffer.  :|

ATRAC is pretty good, I used it on my NW-E3 flash player, though having to convert the mp3s to ATRAC was kind of a pain, not to mention the quality loss due to transcoding. I eventually gave up since I didn’t want 2 copies of the song on my hard drive and also ripping CDs to ATRAC directly and therefore being forced to use OpenMG Jukebox/SonicStage to manage the music.

mp3 continues to work fine for me.  i can live with 128 kbps.

Myself, I’m pretty much limited to 128kbps MP3s for the time being. I use my 512MB MS Pro stick in my Clie for portable sound storage. Space is at a premium and to be honest, I don’t notice a significant difference with the 128k files and earbuds. I’ve never bothered with ATRAC3. It’s not broadly supported, even by Sony themselves. ATRAC3 isn’t supported on my CLie with MS Pro sticks. 

True, very true.

Which Clie do you have?

Erik

The NZ90. The one so battery ineffiecient it needs a removable battery.  :?

The battery life didn’t turn me off, it was the fact that it was a portable brick that I didn’t like…

Erik

It’s not much less pocketable than your NX80. The size and weight don’t really bother me. I usually carry that thing on a belt holster. At the time I bought it, it was the only 320x480 PDA that had BT and the possibility of WiFi.

Not to get into a PDA discussion or anything, but I traded my NX70 for an iPaq 1945. The tiny screen resolution sof the PPC stinks though, and I can’t wait until Sony releases the TH55. No keyboard and almost half the weight of current 320x480 models, as well as BT and WiFi, I’m sold.

I was really impressed with the HP 1940 and 4155 when I saw them in person, but I’m a resolution freak and won’t go back without a good reason. I was thinking about the Toshiba e800, but no BT was a deal-breaker. Poor program VGA support didn’t help. The TH55 seems very cool, but I’m not going to consider another Palm OS5 device. I’ll wait for the new generation of PPCs or Palm OS6 to upgrade.

Back on topic: Y-cables, pro or con?