Hi All, and thanks for any help for this newbie.

My new flat mate has a good quality stereo (~300 GBP amp, 450 GBP
speakers). I tried plugging my laptop in, and compared the one album we
both had (his on CD, mine in mp3 format). The difference was amazing,
with the CD sounding so much better I thought about getting rid of my
whole collection.

I did wonder if it may be the sound card making a difference however.
This was on a cheap dell laptop with the built in sound card. Is there
any point in getting a good sound card and using my desktop to play
them? Is there anything else I could do? It does not need to be
perfect, but somewhere close to CD quality would be good. I tried
playing the CD from the laptop, and that sounded fine.

The mp3 I used was Pink Floyd, Speak to me. Stats according to AVICodec
= Audio : 1.68 MB, 192 Kbps, 44100 Hz, 2 channels, 0x55 = Mpeg-1
audio Layer 3 (MP3), Supported

I noticed one of my mp3's had a much higher sampling rate. I guess 10
times the size is going to be alot better, but I was not convinced.
Audio : 149 MB, 1411 Kbps, 44100 Hz, 2 channels, 0x1 = MS PCM,
Supported.