help wanted!! looking for sound advice

[tontonfila]

I thinking of buying a laptop.....does anyone have any suggestions on soundcards? Also can external soundcards offer the same latency and flexibility as there desktop counterpart?
thanks in advance

[Doc Piano]

Greetings,
There are actually several cards that have recently come available for laptop usage that qualify for "Pro Quality".
They are not cheap, but they are getting into a reasonable price range concidering what you get for the money.
There are two different main types. PCMCIA cards which use the card bus on your computer and USB types. I belive there are also a couple which use the Firewire ports as well.
Keep in mind that only later models of laptops have USB ports that are USB2.0 compatible. This is like 20 times faster transfer rate of data over USB 1.1. Most USB Audio interfaces will require the USB2.0 standard because of band width requirement of transfering the audio at a reasonable rate.
A couple of links for you:

MidiMan (http://www.midiman.com) and choose pro audio and midi from the menu -> audio interfaces.
And
EchoAudio (http://www.echoaudio.com)

Both of these companies are reputable and make a good product. And no, I'm not employed by either. Just a pro musician for the last 35 years.
Cheers and hope that helps ya out.
Later....

:cool:

[mine]

I recently got an "M audio" soundcard which is very good although it is worth concidering how many inputs you will need as some cards have a built in Breakout box as standard and some only have 1 stereo in.

[TLRay]

Toshiba is one of the better laptops and HAS the best warranty...24 hr turn-a-round and comes with the Creative/Yahama sound chip.

[daydreamer]

I agree, Toshiba is really good