Audiophiles: What gear are you currently rocking to enjoy your music?

My stereo system is late 1970s – early 1980s era. It’s all analog, except for the CD player, which I bought in 1982. Everything still works great & I love having a graphic equalizer, dynamic noise filter, and dynamic compressor.

The only real upgrades I’ve made are to replace the speakers around year 2000 (thanks to my kids blowing out the old ones!) and to replace the phonograph cartridge in the early 1990s. I now use the stereo mainly to play MP3s with my iPod, using a spare AUX input. I wish I had a digital FM tuner for the sake of convenience, but I can live with the analog tuner—I don’t listen to much radio anymore.

I think the same rule of thumb applies today as in earlier decades: Spend at least half your budget on good speakers. Then make sure you have an amplifier capable of playing music as loud as you like without distortion. My amplifier is rated at 200 W per channel rms & the sub-woofer is separately powered. My eardrums will probably give out before the speakers do.

(If you prefer headphones to speakers, you’ll save a bundle of money and won’t piss off the neighbors.)

I tried to incorporate the stereo system into the 5.1 surround sound home theater system, but it didn’t work out very well. Better to enjoy the stereo just for audio and have a separate sound system for video.

I still rock my Pioneer “Spec 1” and “Spec 4” amp/ pre amp system I picked up in Baumholder in 1979. I still have a dbx II somewhere but since the tape deck died years ago it really is useless unless I want to expand and compress the source material. I use the DVD player to run disks because the LXI CD player (from Sears) died a long time ago. No FM tuner. That also died so many years ago I forget when. I have a pair of horn loaded Klipch Hereseys also acquired in 1979. They are paired with a pair of Realistic “Minimus 7’s I have hung up on the wall camouflaged with the same paint I did the walls with (tangerine base with antique white sponge spreckle.) I have to be mindful to not crank the volume up past the capacity of the Minimus 7’s but even below the rated output they are still awfully loud. The Heresey’s…they will peel the paint off the walls so they almost never are pushed like they were when we were both younger. Doesn’t seem necessary.

I’ve got a Technics amp I bought in the early 90’s that puts out to four Wharfedale speakers (they sound divine, two floor standing waist high speakers and two bookshelf speakers). Feeding in to the amp I have a Behringer VMX300 mixer to which I have two Technics 1210 Record Decks connected and my desktop PC and my laptop and Reloop Digital Jockey I also have a Technics Tape Deck which is currently not connected but is usually connected directly to my amp bypassing the mixer and also wired to record the output (use this to record drum loops to tape and then record them back to my PC to get that nice warm tape distortion noise)

@gasman congrats on getting a CD player that has lasted since ‘82, the lasers in them never normally last that long.

I’ve also got some Sennheiser headphones I use for studio work and some Sony ones for DJing