What's the brand?
I have 3 laptops. One of them is not too great with the audiobytes (older Compact), but the other 2 are fine (old Toshiba and recent HP). One of my employees once came with a tiny IBM thinkpad (the very expensive ones; I know, the company pays for them!
). and it did clip quite a bit when trying to drive the system louder. My desktop has no problem whatsoever.
As a test, do you have high-impedence headphones? The same machines (4 laptops) have similar results with my Sennheiser HD650 or PXC250. 2 of them are ok (not great, but decent, some compression, no distortion) with the 300Ohm while 1 has poor performance (heavy dynamic compression, slightly fuzzy sound) and the IBM thinkpad actually "cuts" with those headphones (unbearable). None of them have any kind of issues with lower impedence.
Do you have other source like a DVD or CD player that you could connect directly to the audiobytes?
