Have you been dissatisfied by the sound of your internet music source…lousy headphones or the tin box sound out of your laptop speakers? OK, maybe you just spent a bundle on a new home theater system right? Hopefully, this new configuration includes a digital receiver. If you have an Apple Macbook, you are in luck. A little known digital audio output sits just behind the headphone jack.

With a proper cable (approximately $14) you can bypass the DA conversion on the Macbook and stream your iTunes, Pandora or LastFM (any other music source) to the one of digital inputs in the back of the receiver.

The receiver has a far superior DA converter AND it is sending the music to a system that can do something with it! Plug the Toslink cable into the regular headphone jack, when I mentioned behind the headphone jack earlier I meant it sits behind it internally. When you plug in the cable the speakers on the Macbook will go silent and the signal will be going directly to the digital receiver.

Pandora and many others stream at up to 128K, you get a pretty darn good sounding source in the Macbook, all for the cost of this simple cable. A conversation I had with Pandora folks months back indicated they are looking at streaming at higher speeds in the future.

If you have any cabling tips, drop me a comment and I let the music world know.

TonyM_one tiny cable and you get better sounding tunes.

View tonymomo's Profile      Subscribe via RSS