Recently bought a used HP laptop. Chief reasons for purchase were 8gb of ram and a core i3 processor or higher. Both aspects fine.
But what surprised me was the appreciable difference in audio quality. It has B&O Play, and on first listen through the in-built speakers the sound was sharp and clear but still inescapably tinny. But playing it through a pretty basic bluetooth setup (logitech adaptor connected to my ancient but ever trusty decades-old Technics midi system) the difference is appreciable, even compared to an iPad Mini 3, which was my Spotify player of choice previously.
Pleasantly surprised.
I also bought an HP laptop a couple of years ago. Core-i7 processor and 4x USB3 ports. Only 4GB RAM, so I paid a bit extra to upgrade to 8GB. It has Beats Audio but I was not greatly impressed with it. Not that much better than anything I’d had before.
I use an external USB sound card with it and a pair of old but good Bose active computer speakers that I hooked out of a skip years ago. Sound is a tiny touch too muddy/bassy and the midrange could be a bit better (that’s the speakers, I suspect). I use it for YouTube clip and Spotify listening and I’m reasonably happy with it.
My main digitised music collection is played via a Toshiba core-i3 laptop (with really shitty, weedy default sound) via USB again into a Cambridge Audio DACMagic DAC (along with digital-optical feeds from my Denon CD player and Sony Minidisc deck) into my Denon amp and Mission speakers. It sounds pretty good to me, though the Toshiba laptop is prone to occasional flakiness and could do with a total Windows 10 reinstall.
Both laptops have been retrofitted with SSDs and my music collection is cloned on 3 big external HDDs. The main one is connected to the Toshiba and the 2 backup drives to the HP.
Listening to a recording of Dylan Thomas reading from “A Child’s Christmas In Wales”, from a rather low-res 2010 podcast.
Some of the sound card software has “enhanced audio” which is effectively tone altering software built in which tweaks the sound. It’s quite hard to switch off actually – it generally switches itself on every time you start up.