I have had a lot of trouble in the past with the generally extremely poor sound quality from most laptops, even extremely high end ones. Lets face it inside a computer case with all that digital mush about is just not a good place for audio signals. Add to that the ultra compact nature of many laptops and its probably surprising that they get any sort of usable audio out. This box fixes all that. The output level can go extremely high, but is continually adjustable with a pot. The sound is very clean and although not quite audiophile grade is very good. The headphone output has a very slight constant hiss just barely audible at the limit of my hearing but this does not seem to be present on the main XLR outs to the desk. My manual had an addendum inside with a warning to ensure that the isolation transformers are switched in when using on a desk with global phantom power. I leave the isolation switched in just to be safe. So far it has worked without any driver installation on every computer I've plugged it into, Windows, Mac and Linux. Before getting this unit I always used an external USB audio interface and a DI box, never the mini-jack outputs. This is a much neater solution.
