Have had the same hifi for close to 20 years. Arcam Alpha6 CD, Naim Nait 3, Rega ELA speakers. Didnt get much use in the last few years because a) The cats munched through my £200 Chord interconnects. Twice. b) the drawer loading mechanism on the CD player died twice. The first time I was given a replacement part by Arcam (great customer service - free of charge on a 10+ year old player, and they even posted overseas!). By the time it went a second time, and without an interconnect I never got around to fixing it.<p>After a recent house move I dusted it off, plugged it into my Apogee Duet headphone out and tried playing some FLAC encoded audio through it. Sound isn't great though, and not much better than the built-in soundcard of my HTPC. So I'm trying to figure out what is the first thing to sort out: 1. Speakers? At 20 years old, is it time to replace them? The main drivers both have small tears in the rubber, but otherwise look ok. 2. Cheap interconnect cable. Is this likely to be the main issue? 3. Would I get much better sound from the line jack outputs from the Duet rather than the headphone out? 4. Or am I expecting too much from the Duet (given that it's primarily a recording device)? How much would I need to spend on a standalone DAC to get an improvement? And is there any point at looking at streamers if I already have a (albeit cheap and nasty) PC in the rack? On a separate note, would I be doing something bad by shoving a couple of these jack->phono adapters into the balanced line outs on the Duet, and then hooking up a regular phono cable? vs. getting a dedicated cable like this one? (Btw, apologies for the formatting - doesnt seem like any way to get this post to format correctly..)