Laptop.....speakers

<p>Most bose stuff is an absolute ripoff...sorry, it just is.</p>

<p>As to videogamer's comment, everything there rings true except a couple of things: First, upsampling the audio itself is not going to do anything for you, it could actualy make the signal worse. The recording from the CD is 16 bit 44.1khz and nothing can change that. It is an often criticized fault of the creative cards that they change sampling (on the digital outputs especially). doing it with fb2k wont make a difference. Also, better cables might help a little but Monster Cable is a company founded on the idea of ripping off the customer. Go to a home depot and buy some 18 guage speaker cable and it will be just right for the fittings on the promedias (for pennies a foot compared to tons of $$$ for Monster even though its almost the same).</p>

<p>A new, unreleased card from creative isnt sure to help you out at all (upsampling issues and other strange software defects that creative takes a while to fix on new cards). But if you moved to a higher quality manufacturer for the souncard (creative makes the best gaming cards but they are not the best cards on the market for audio) like M-Audio or Terratec, you might be able to sense an improvement. </p>

<p>I currently have a Terratec DMX-6fire with a front I/O box that is great. It's audio capabilities are outstanding (uses the Envy24 chipset) but it lacks the most modern gaming sound modes (like EAX2 and hte such) which is why my next card will probobly be an M-Audio Revolution which is based on the Envy24HT and has modern gaming support. I will lose my I/O box but its ok because I do not do recording like I used to (and when I do, my friend has an external m-audio box with real mic inputs).</p>

<p>"Harmon Kardon Sound Sticks 2 are the ones I'm hoping to get"</p>

<p>that's what I have (except maybe not "2"?), but they sound wonderful</p>

<p>they come with 18 gauge wire, I was thinking more like 16</p>

<p>fb2k makes a difference because the processor can interpolate more richly than the sound card (at the expense of very high processor use), but it doesn't really apply to CDs, more sub-256kbps mp3s</p>