im starting to believe the whole garbage in garbage out idea. on the run of the mill shitty mp3 encodes, the laptop speakers sound exactly like one would assume - shitty. however, on the tracks i got from hdtracks and some other hi rez stuff and well recorded albums (sara k, patricia barber, dave koz) they actually dont sound half bad. better than ibuds at least. i cant stand them with good quality music (higher bitrate etc etc)