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