Quote Originally Posted by Hyfi
My advice is to get a decent audio system to listen to music and use your computer for computing.
Please don't take this personally, but IMHO this is terrible advice!

Computer-based music listening is f*cking awesome. I presently have about 6,000 songs on my hard drive (with 99.9% of them in a CD-quality format), and it is absolutely the best way to listen to music I could possibly set up.

I can access anyone of my songs instantly without getting out of my chair. Our I can build playlists, randomize them, sort songs by band/genre/whatever, search through my collection, you name it. It is incredibly flexible, powerful, and convenient. There's no other way to do something like this without using a computer.

The possibility for hi fidelity sound is also superior. I do all the digital-to-audio conversion outside the computer. You can get killer DACs these days for next to nothing. I use a Squeezebox2 with a fairly decent DAC, and it sounds better than my CD player did. If you want to spend a few bucks, you can get a used Benchmark DAC1 for $800 or so that will give you great hi fidelity sound. As DACs drop in price (along with hard drive space), the computer-based approach will only get better and cheaper.

The other thing you get with a computer is Internet radio, which *kicks ass*. There are thousands and thousands of internet radio stations out there, and a lot of them sound really good. I don't care how obscure your musical tastes are, you can find multiple stations that play stuff you want to hear, without commercials.

With my computer, I'm listening to more music than I ever did before, and I'm discovering stuff I never would have known about before. It's abolutely the medium of the future; the longer you resist it, the more you are punishing yourself.