Beginner System

[jaz9090]

Hello, I am a student and a relative beginner to all this kind of stuff. I have always loved music and being a musician love to hear music reproduced to a very high quality. A couple of years ago I replaced my ipod headphones with some etymotic er6i earphones and was blown away by the quality of the sound reproduction through them. Whilst at uni I have bought some a sound blaster z680 surround sound system which when i had problems with it was replaced with a z5500 system. These are ok but i dont think brilliant for reproduction (they are after all pimped up computer speakers) - i should really upgrade the cables. Anyway I currently have about £500 to spend and I am looking to get some really high quality output for my music. With that budget I won't be able to get much on the hifi system front (correct me if I am wrong) so i thought perhaps headphones and a headphone amp (from what I have read) this is what i am thinking: A pair of Gradi SR325i headphones A Creek OBH21SE Headphone Amplifier I should say that most of my music is on my macbook/ipod and on cds played via my macbook or ripped onto there. Is the laptop too large of a bottleneck for decent sound quality? and am i right in thinking £500 is just to little to buy any sort of decent system what do you recommend? Thanks, hope that all makes sense James

 

[Anonymous]

Hi James,

Honestly, don't put yourself down over your budget. When I was at uni I certainly didn't have £500 to play with! And with that money you can actually do pretty well hi-fi wise.

If you check out the latest issue of the magazine, you'll see we did a one-make hi-fi test, in which a £450 Cambridge Audio system is awarded a full five-stars. A system like that will sound great if you play your CDs straight through it, and the amp and speakers will have a good stab at your digital collection, too.

If you still think the headphone route is better for you, you can get great sound for £500. The Grado headphones and Creek amp you've mentioned will do the job nicely.

Overall, there's nothing wrong with playing music from a laptop, but try to keep the compression to a minimum. Go with WAV encoding if possible, and if hard disk space is an issue, put aside some of your budget for a new hard drive. Shop around and you'll be able to pick up a 500gb external unit from a decent company for under £70.

 

[Anonymous]

While you're on the subject, I should mention that you can compress your audio files with either FLAC or Apple Lossless Codec (for iPod compatibility), which will reduce them to about 40-50% of their WAV size, while still maintaining identical audio quality. They are sort of like audiophile versions of the MP3 format, and come highly recommended.