Re: Why has stereo Mix been disabled on thinkpads & when do we get a formal response

drtigerlilly · ‎02-29-2008

I am a student and this is my only PC. I bought the x61t knowing that it was a business slated machine, but b/c i wanted a tablet pc, and i wanted a machine that would be well constructed and durable. I was aware that previous models had the feature, and as i've mentioned previously, part of the issue, across the board, stems from the fact, that OEM's don't mention the presence of absence of this feature....so i only found out after recieving the notebook and trying to use it, that it was absent.

I like revduane, use the feature for online Karaoke
I also use it to produce *master recordings* as revduane put it of myself singing
and i use it to stream audio from my pc online.

I do wish that i'd known this when i was choosing which machine i was going to buy.

eecon · ‎02-13-2008

Mark_Lenovo,

I appreciate all your followup regarding this Stereo Mix issue.

I am one of the fortunate few who have successfully used an Express/54 slot external X-fi sound card to restore all recoding capabilities on my T61 (using WinXP and not Vista) and no longer have a dog in this fight.

However, I'll take the liberty here to add my take on what I believe is happening with a short historical and political perspective about the root cause that led to Lenovo and other Asian owned manufacturers to disable sound recording capabilities recently:

As we all have read in the news, copyright violations and pirating of intellectual property has been a hot button issue for years here in the USA, and much of the concern was directed at Asian countries where most of the copyright abuse had allegedly been occuring.

Asian leaders are obviously sensitive to this issue and they are constantly being urged by U.S. trade officials to crack down on alleged copyright pirating. With China's welcome into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its recent upgrade to preferred member nation trading status with the U.S., it makes complete sense for Lenovo to give U.S. politicians and RIAA lobbyists what they wanted, including sound recording crippled laptops.

As U.S. consumers slowly begin to complain (and believe me, the snowball has only begun rolling down the hill and will be getting larger and larger over the coming months), the Asian manufacturers will be hearing more and more complaints which they will wisely forward to all those U.S. trade officials and RIAA lobbists. Eventually the Asian leaders may also politely advise those same U.S. trade officials that if we continually upset the consumer masses in order to simply line the pockets of U.S. software companies, wealthy entertainment executives, rock-stars, etc., the mass public may simply shop elsewhere (or worse yet, stop shopping all together). And if they start shopping elsewhere or stop altogether, then Asian countries will earn less money and thus buy less U.S. Treasury debt. This will push U.S. interest rates up again in order to attract other buyers of U.S. debt so we Americans can continue spending beyond our means like drunken sailors ...... spending both personally and via proxy for U.S. military adventures overseas, et al.

This issue reminds me of the wise-old saying "be careful what you wish for."

I believe Lenovo's management is quietly handling this issue wisely.

Welcome everyone to our new global economic reality

Message Edited by eecon on 04-21-2008 11:26 AM

Message Edited by eecon on 04-21-2008 11:28 AM

Message Edited by eecon on 04-21-2008 11:33 AM

Message Edited by eecon on 04-21-2008 11:38 AM

Message Edited by eecon on 04-21-2008 11:40 AM

Message Edited by eecon on 04-21-2008 11:40 AM

Two (I used to have Five) - T61p 15.4" WS T9300 2.5Ghz units, August 08/08 Builds with FX570M Nvidia Graphics; ... One W520 i7-2860QM w/2000M Nvidia Graphics (most recent acquisition and stupidly fast); .... One - T42 4:3 15" Flexview 1.8GHz with ATI Graphics (still perfect for traveling); ... Two - T500 15.4" units both with ATI HD3650 Graphics.

rec630 · ‎03-22-2008

I don't have needs (yet) that haven't already been discussed but I too have a USB device for converting VHS to DVD and a USB device for converting LP/Cassettes to CD. I've also had the need to record web meetings.

It doesn't sound like any of this will work on the new T61 unless I downgrade to XP and purchase the X-Fi card which is very disappointing.

usenet7 · ‎02-12-2008

I use it in audio rooms such as in Paltalk and Yahoo, each of which has 10s of thousands of participants at any one time. One can act as a dj by playing music and talking over the music. Karaoke would also use this.

A larger use is to record online audio, such as internet phone calls, streaming content, etc., for later hearing.

billbolton · ‎12-02-2007

mixz1 wrote:

I don't think that it was unreasonable of any purchaser to assume (and yes, I know you should never assume anything) that the stereo mix feature, like the TrackPoint, would be carried forward as it had been on every ThinkPad in my recent memory. I think Lenovo, as well as the others has acted to deliberately conceal this removal, as is evidenced by this thread and in particular the very long thread at forum.thinkpads.com.

The world changes, and its up to you as a buyer to determine whether any new product model support what you need from it.

To suggest that the vendors are deliberately concealing something is simply unsustainable. There are numerous things that don't exist on contemporary laptop models that used to be provided in the past, such as serial ports, S-Video ports, floppy disc drive connectors etc etc.

Cheers,

Bill

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I don't work for Lenovo

Mark_Lenovo · ‎11-19-2007

All,

Thanks for the discussion so far, and I certainly expect it to continue. I have to believe what I'm told by the engineer on this matter as to why it's not a simple driver tweak to re-enable, that it is specifically not supported through the hardware. I honestly don't know all the how and why this came to be.

We can all speculate on whether this was politically motivated, or simply the consequence of some changes the audio chipmakers made. Lenovo has no plans to change the boards on existing machines.

I asked the questions about usage, so that I could discuss the matter more coherently on a customer needs basis internally and be able to explain the kinds of real life scenarios that people increasingly use PCs for, and might need this feature for.

As Bill notes, there are many vestidges of the PC that are slowing being phased out - the 5.25" floppy - long gone, the 3.5" floppy, external parallel and serial connections. How long before the built in modem is phased out? How about a plain CD Rom drive, or even a non-DVD burner? Obsolete. No midi ports? PCMICA ports, especially type III are gone. It looks like 4:3 aspect displays may be phasing out too, driven by LCD manufacturers and the burgeoning market for massive flatscreen home TVs.

Do manufacturers actively promote all the things the next model doesn't have? No. They focus on what it does have - more memory, bigger and faster HDDs, longer battery life, more powerful CPUs, etc. And all at a cost of hundreds or even thousands less than those prior models. I have to believe the marketing and development teams focus on the features that will deliver the broadest value to the most people, at the best value point, and make decisions accordingly, in partnership with suppliers.

Perhaps this feature could return on some future model(?)

After all, people voted, and the stripes were put back on the X300 buttons...

Thanks again for everyone's ongoing input on the matter.

revduane · ‎03-14-2008

I find it interesting that when we speak of this, everyone seems to think that it is the buyers fault that the sound card is crippled and was not evident.

As for the comparisons to the serial port, floppy drives, etc. This is true. There is one BIG difference though. Everything that has been removed in those instances was because there was something better to replace it that does the same job in a much better fashion. It is usually evident to people that the ports, for instance, are not listed in the specs of the machine. In this case, something was removed that was NOT replaced by something newer or better, but I would bet is used by lots more people than you will ever get to grace this board. This would be evidenced by the fact that the one Karoke site I belong to boasts thousands of members. Without the feature, the site is useless.

Regardless of how much we try to defend the "poor little manufacturer", in this case they screwed up. Several manufacturers did. The only problem is, Lenovo seems to be about the only one that doesn't want to fess up and make their customers happy. That's pretty sad.

Ok, rant mode off.

Thank you,

Duane

Message Edited by revduane on 04-22-2008 08:33 AM

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T61p (6459CTO), 4 gig ram, 100 meg 7200 rpm disk drive, NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M, Windows XP-Pro SP3.

drtigerlilly · ‎02-29-2008

How are obsolete technologies even remotely comparable to removing a valid & useful feature. And regardless if marketing chooses to emphasize bigger HD's, CPU's, Memory etc, when ports, or peripherals etc have been removed you KNEW BEFOREHAND from the specs that these things would not be present.

I agree with revduane completely, for whatever reason it was done, customers were left out of the loop & now its our fault???
AMAZING....

I've come to terms that the machine won't have the feature, but ..oh well things change and " its up to you as a buyer to determine whether any new product model support what you need from it." ...HOW exactly were users supposed to determine tihs?

Message Edited by drtigerlilly on 04-22-2008 06:12 AM

billbolton · ‎12-02-2007

drtigerlilly wrote:

HOW exactly were users supposed to determine tihs?

The usual method is to read the specification for the machine and don't just assume that something is provided that isn't in the specification. If its unclear ask the supplier, especially for something that is crucial to the application the product will be applied to.

Cheers,

Bill

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I don't work for Lenovo

hellosailor · ‎04-13-2008

Bill,

I can tell you why this fool didn't see that the T61p had dropped stereo mic and stereo line in:

TOO MUCH INFORMATION.

It took me many hours to try configuring a Thinkpad and I was NOT looking for the T61p. I looked at lots of details, lots of features, and everything I looked at had mic and line in included. As has pretty much EVERY notebook I looked at. Video features may have differed, but almost everything has mic and line inputs.

So when Lenovo's phone sales staff told me that the only way I could get the UWXGA screen was by bumping it up to the T61p, I said do it. I didn't check the entire spec sheet because I was already exhausted from weeks of pulling teeth--literally--trying to get a correct quote from them. It took nearly ten days to get a quote without the WWAN, every time I caught an error, they'd make two more correcting it.

So yes, it is my fault for not checking on this feature. And, Lenovo's fault for telling me that I wouldn't be loosing anything by "upgrading" to this machine, or making it clearer that it was omitting something that seems to be standard on every other machine for the last decade.

I don't think this is an RIAA conspiracy, I think someone just cheaped out and tried to save five bucks on the manufacturing cost by leaving out one physical jack. And being a cheap SOB on a top-end top-dollar machine, is simply being an SOB.