My IBM ThinkPad T42p is a portable audio-testing lab. It's a music recording and production facility. It stores and retouches photos; it re-encodes files to different formats. It's also an audio and video repository from which I can quickly load digital audio players and multimedia devices for testing. And at the moment, it's teaching me to play guitar better.
I seldom use the ThinkPad for "normal" applicationsword processing, spreadsheets, e-mail, IM, and the like. I have another notebook for that, and it makes sense to me to keep the functions separate. The T42p is a powerhouse, with a gigabyte of memory and a very serviceable 2.4-GHz Pentium M, so it gets the processing-intensive jobs.
My audio testing is facilitated by an M-Audio Transit USB, an external USB device with both audio and optical inputs and outputs. Beyond its very respectable audio performance specs, its best attribute is that it has no external adjustments or level controls of any kind, so the gain is always the same. The driver bypasses the sliders in the Microsoft Windows volume control, so results from audio players that I test weeks or months apart are consistent and repeatable. The Transit USB does have a setting in the driver where you can increase the gain for low-level signal sources such as microphones, but I leave that alone.Continue reading