I haven’t bought a piece of honest-to-God stereo equipment in ages. I got my home stereo to the point where my ears were satisfied — particularly in regard to speakers — and from that point on haven’t thought much about it. However, over the past few years the home stereo has moved into my office, since I do most of my music listening by the computer (given that the whole collection is ripped to the hard disk) and I began to be aware that I was not taking full advantage of my PowerMac’s ability to stream digital audio data into a digital amplifier.
So I retired one of my Onkyo Integra amplifiers (I have two, both dating from the 1980s) and got a Yamaha A/V receiver with digital everything, and hooked it up to the Mac using a TOSLink optical/digital cable and got everything all set up — including using a small pair of extra speakers I had hanging around for surround sound (although no subwoofer; I might get one, though).
The difference was astonishing — perhaps mainly because I hadn’t realized just how much noise there is in an analog connection from a computer to an amplifier. Oh, I knew there was some (you can’t help but hear all that whizzing and bubbling and popping caused by the intense electrical activity inside a computer), but I didn’t realize just how much detail it was masking. It’s a bit uncanny, using headphones and hearing absolutely….NOTHING….between tracks. No whoosh, no buzz, no nothing.
So it’s all a lot of fun, re-visiting my recordings and hearing them as if I hadn’t ever heard them before.
Life’s little pleasures…