A Good (cheap) Laptop for Audio? (Audacity)

[buildingit]

Hi,

The most cpu intensive thing I want to do on it is to use Audacity to change the tempo of various mp3s. In an ideal world, if it exists, I would like to do that realtime- ie, directly at playback- enter a tempo and let it change it immediately rather than re-writing the whole song. I would like the laptop play the music from its own speakers or hook it up to a stereo system and let it play though that.

I was all set to but the

Toshiba Satelliteb 17.3" AMD Athlon 2 Dual-Core M320 2.1GHz 3GB Ram (L550D-00Q)

or the

Toshiba Satellite 17.3" Intel Dual Core T4300 2.1GHz 4GB Ram(L550-00R)

but then I read a customer review saying that it sounds terrible and that is sometimes hangs up (choppy) on playback!

Both are about $600 Canadian.

So, I don't know... how expensive tdo I have to go?

thanx

[flanzig1]

Just about all laptops sound bad with the built in speakers. Use headphones or an inexpensive set of speakers. Not sure if one is better than the other. I would think that what the chipset is being used for theaudio and the audio software that comes with it would be the more important factor than the CPU.

[buildingit]

thank you for responding!

that is good to know about the speakers then.

But re the audio chipset, I am not sure? The mp3 must be read and converted- the tempo changed. Does the audio chipset do that? Not the cpu? I am trying a couple of programs- one is called CluDJProDJ and it has a llittle CPU usage bar at the top. And ya, it crashed once on my 1.6 GHz.

That's kindof why I intially posted this in the audio forum...... I will ask over there.

Thank you again for responding