Multi Media to Go, Please.

As an update to this thread for airplane flights, I can report that I did upgrade to the Sennheisers, and have just really enjoyed them on an 8.5 hour return flight from Zurich to New York.

I was also thrilled with a new Lenovo netbook S10. The keyboard is a bit cramped and the screen is small and the processor slow, but it looks great and the overall build quality is better than many notebooks. Lenovo now stocks the long life battery, so with the long life as a spare, I was able to work and/or listen to music for the entire long haul flight.

Most importantly, every pound saved when traveling is critical - so I dont think I will travel with a full sized laptop again. Mainly I am editing docs or spreadsheets etc while listening to music so can otherwise leave the processing power at home.

For the next level, I want to use the Grado headphone amp.

Could anyone suggest other ideas for "best practice"?

Are there any USB powered or battery powered DACs with RCA out which would then go into the headphone amp?

Thanks for this and any other ideas from airplane travelers.

cwlondon

After nearly 5 years since the beginning of this thread, perhaps many of you have new ideas for listening to music and watching movies on airplanes.

I have just returned from London and although Virgin Atlantic is usually on time, in this case we were delayed for 3 hours leaving Heathrow, and circled Newark for nearly an hour before landing. Brutal. Their tiny video screens are very reflective, and the audio and headphones are horrific.

Listening to my iPod through (I confess!) Bose noise cancellation headphones was far better, but still not very good.

Therefore, I am thinking about dusting off my old Grado headphone amp, upgrading to the Sennheiser 450 noise cancelling headphones ($$$ but seem well made?), and perhaps a new laptop, now that ripping WAV files and decent video is so easy.

Battery life, laptop screen size and quality and weight are still the tricky variables, so it would be great to hear from any of you who have ideas on this.

Dont know if anyone has tried Headroom, but they seem to have a USB DAC which looks small enough for travel?

Thank you.

I agree with Sogood51 to check out doom9.net I like divx out of the avialable compressions. Note: It's a pain and takes several hours to do this...plus you want at least a 700Mhz processor to watch this on (something to consider if you have a laptop).

divx has a free (adware) software that allows you to rip movies onto your harddrive in decent looking files that are about 700mb for 2 hours so they fit onto a cd. a decent harddrive will hold a big collection of these and they are easily viewed with divx player or winamp or wmp. www.divx.com

doom9.net has all the free ripping tools and enough info to keep you reading for a few days.