anyone here less than satisfied with their ibook's sound card quality?

[Kaboom]

cuz i just bought an iBook and sure, it outputs sound. JUST. the midrange is completely muddy,there is no such thing and trebble and bass is only JUST acceptable. this is on a pair of grado SR-80s and outputting the sound via the headphone jack to my stereo
i find it very mediocre in quality.
is it just me, or am i expecting too much out of a 1 grand computer?
Are there any possible solutions besides the obligatory external soundacard?
cheers!

[bacchanal]

With notebooks (and many desktops for that matter), you're not gettting a 'soundcard', you're getting sound integrated into the motherboard. Major compromises must be made. Some of the larger, desktop replacement, type notebooks may have better sound solutions, but I doubt it.

The only thing to look at before looking into external solutions is the source. Make sure you're playing back cd, WAV or whatever apple's raw format is (can't remember at the moment). This will tell you if you're truely hearing the soundcard or if it is just a lossy compression format (mp3, etc).

I'm not sure what's out there as far as external solutions for mac, but M-Audio might be a good bet.

You can try calling the folks at sweetwater.com. They are more pro-audio, but they deal with macs quite a bit, are very knowledgeable, and will look at your problem from a sound-guy perspective rather than a computer-guy perspective.