Laptop PC as substitute for conventional cd player

[foofer]

Hi
I would like to consult with some keen audiofiles out there who are more abreast with sound technology than I am .
Being an ex musician I listen to a lot of music and more importantly have a lot of cd's that lie around the house and that are constantly in the way ! As space is a problem where I live I was thinking if only there was a way to use a laptop pc without compromising sound quality ( very important ) to store all my music on and use it instead of the bulky cd player to play it out into my existing system . It would also be advantageous in the fact that you would have your entire collection at your fingertips !
The ideal would be a soundcard that is at least equal to or better in reproducing audio cd's in the CDDA format than a conventional cd player , and being able to plug an analogue Left Ch and Right Ch out from it into my power amp.
Are there any solutions on the market that would work in this context ?

Thanks to all

 

[EXCellR8]

So... are you looking for a laptop with a good onboard sound? Most newer laptops have pretty decent audio quality. Just get a nice pair of speakers and then rip your CD's to the hard drive using Nero software or something similar. For playback, I would recommend using WinAMP so that you can play various audio formats, add track info, and compile playlists within your collection. There are other audio players, but WinAMP is one of the best imo.

 

[foofer]

Hi thanks for the advice.
Yes I am looking for a laptop with good on board sound but the problem is how do I rate the quality of the audio I can expect before I buy ? . The specs of some cd players are freq. responce 2 to 20khz and a sampling freq of 44.1Khz , this does not seem to appear on most sound cards . Here they talk about 8 ,16 and 24 bit sampling and 192Kb etc , where do these meet each other ?
Your suggestion of winamp sounds good I will give it a try !

 

[EXCellR8]

Any 24-bit audio adapter, including mobile, should sound pretty good. I have a slightly older 24-bit Sound Blaster card in my desktop and it sounds incredible hooked up to a decent set of speakers. It supports 192Khz and 106dB SNR. I would imagine that most new-ish laptop computers come with some sort of high-quality audio adapter built in, especially if it's running Windows Vista.

 

[foofer]

Right sounds good . I'll see whats available with similiar specs and work from there onwards
Thanks mate !