Hardware Laptop for MIDI work

[Beware]

So I'm a Hammond Organ player and I am trying to get a small group together. Obviously, I can't carry my Hammond around and I don't have the money to get a chopped one (I want to keep at least one intact). I have been fooling around with Native Instruments B4 and it's not perfect, but it gets a LOT of things right. I also have a couple other programs similar to B4 (like Arturia Moog V) and I would really like to perform with it. So I need a laptop that has a really good sound card and can offer the lowest possible latency I can get. Or maybe a VERY tiny desktop, but I doubt that. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[ackers]

Sorry to kinda hijack your thread but does a new sound card really make music sound that much better? I just got a new set of speakers (Logitech Z-4s) and I want them to play at their best.

 

[Beware]

Sorry to kinda hijack your thread but does a new sound card really make music sound that much better? I just got a new set of speakers (Logitech Z-4s) and I want them to play at their best.

Yes and no. A better sound card allows you to get better performance with more advanced formats, therefore allowing to encode you music better (I believe), but it's best used for music creation. A better sound card reduces latency and can provide near real time recording and playback.

EDIT: A better way to get your music to sound its best is to encode in a better format. FLAC is nice.

 

[Lee79]

The onboard sound chips that they use on laptops (and desktops with cheap onboard sound) are generally pretty low quality. There might be a laptop with decent sound, but I'm not aware of any. There's very few people that generally use laptops the way you want to, so there's not much demand for high quality sound. The manufacturers save a couple bucks by putting in the cheapest sound chip that will satisfy the "average" user.

You could just get any laptop and this http://www.soundblaster.com/products/produ...mp;product=9103 and this http://www.yamaha-europe.com/yamaha_europe...UX16/index.html but for live performance I would recommend a Mac as it is more stable then Windows the last thing you want is it crashing while performing live.

 

[Beware]

The onboard sound chips that they use on laptops (and desktops with cheap onboard sound) are generally pretty low quality. There might be a laptop with decent sound, but I'm not aware of any. There's very few people that generally use laptops the way you want to, so there's not much demand for high quality sound. The manufacturers save a couple bucks by putting in the cheapest sound chip that will satisfy the "average" user.

You could just get any laptop and this http://www.soundblaster.com/products/produ...mp;product=9103 and this http://www.yamaha-europe.com/yamaha_europe...UX16/index.html but for live performance I would recommend a Mac as it is more stable then Windows the last thing you want is it crashing while performing live.

I can't afford a Mac. Plain and simple. The sound cards in MacBooks aren't that good either, so I can't afford a MacBook plus what ever new hardware I would need on top of it. I have $500 of music software I'm not going to just throw away. Windows is plenty stable if you keep it maintained and it also much better for a power user, like myself. And if I'm running Windows for my software then there is no reason to over pay for the hardware. It would be a waste of money to buy a Mac since I would just run Linux and Windows anyways (I truly cannot stand OS X).

EDIT: Also, how is the latency on USB MIDI cables and external sound boxes like that? I don't really care how it gets done as long I can get very low latency (I need around 3 milliseconds).