Mike Kobrin

Consider a scene from a hypothetical Hollywood thriller: Our heroine, filled with dread and whispering into her cellphone, walks slowly down a dark hallway toward a closed door. The sounds that make this scene come alive—-her voice, her footsteps, the creaking floorboards, the background music—-began as a bunch of prerecorded digital files on a hard drive. It took a sound engineer’s touch-—and a machine like the Euphonix System 5—-to blend them into the final, seamless soundtrack.

Now you can rock out even with puny laptop speakers. Normally when you try to pump up the bass using the equalizer settings in iTunes or other software, you inadvertently distort your music's sound by boosting frequencies that small speakers can't reproduce. New software and chips promise crisper sound and fuller bass, using tricks such as toning down the extra-low frequencies that your speakers can't handle. We tested the tech by cranking the volume on CDs, DVDs and MP3s on three laptops.