Can I get stereo sound into laptop

[Aughie]

On my old Dell M5040 laptop there were two simple  3.5" jack sockets one for input and the other output. I was able to plug a dual 3,5 jack cable into the headphone socket of my tape player the other end into the input mic socket of the Dell and it allowed me to digitise my old tape collection in stereo.

My new HP laptop has just one 3.5 inch socket and from what I googled this might be 3 pole or 4  pole it might be somthing called OMPT which is not compaible with CITA devices (whatever those are) and if I do get the right cable, splitter, adaptor, then what way do I set it up to replicate what the Dell did so easily? Thanks

[iomare]

Hi,

To get stereo sound into laptop you are going to need an external USB soundcard. There are many to choose from and you just have to make sure that they have stereo input. Here are a couple of examples I just looked at to answer your question.

Examples:

http://uk.creative.com/p/sound-blaster/sound-blaster-digital-music-premium-hd

http://www.ionaudio.com/products/details/u-record

http://www.music-group.com/Categories/Behringer/Computer-Audio/Audio-Interfaces/UFO202/p/P0A12

You can probably find them cheaper if you look on large online stores

Hope it helps,

David

[Aughie]

While I was waiting a reply and thanks by the way I found a solution of my own. I happened to spot a guy on Gumtree selling a 10" screen EMachines mini laptop for £20.  From the pic I noted it had the requsite in/out jack ports. It was running Windoze XP. I went saw and for £15 bought it.  Couldnt be happier and just to be bloody minded about it I played some music on my shiny new HP all bells and whistles laptop costing me  x21 times as much and used my new little marrvel to record the result in stereo. To be frank im more happy with that little machine than the HP crippled offering. Ill never buy HP again they clearly pay miore heed to the Simon Cowpats of this world than their paying customers. PS I had forgotten just how good an OS XP actually was.

[iomare]

Hi,

When you say it has the in jack, do you mean microphone jack? Mearly all Microphone jacks on laptops or computers will have Mono input no matter what the actual brand of the PC is. It is very difficult to find a notebook which has stereo input and a lot of more modern PCs have done away with the microphone jack since there is a Microphone integrated in the PC. 

https://books.google.it/books?id=ewFwAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA50&lpg=PA50&dq=simon+cowpats&source=bl&ots=74lUkw...

Hope it helps,

David

[Aughie]

When I get time I will take a photo of my setup recording stereo into the Emachine windows XP mini laptop from the HP. Heres the curious thing I discovered I could use something called stereomix on the HP to record directly onto it from utube videos in stereo too so this seems to me an issue with the change from using dedicated jack input and seperate output to a smartphone style single do it all single jack socket in the HP. The headphone socket on the HP or any device outputs stereo to headphones. Instead of headphones I insert the double headed jack from the HPs headphone socket to the dedicated mic socket on the Mini E machine and I guarantee you I can record in stereo. When my dell died it took most of my digitised tape collection with it so I would like to re do all that if I can and the Emachine will allow me to do so.