Without a good set of headphones, everything else is irrelevant. The number one item that affects the music you hear is the speakers.I hesitate to say lifetime, but they're multiple decade investments at the very least. Unlike your computer, or your car, your headphones will never wear out or become obsolete.This is about extracting the maximum bang for your buck: As I wrote in 2005's Headphone Snobbery:Īm I really advocating spending two hundred dollars on a set of headphones? Yes. That said, if you enjoy music even a little, I still strongly recommend investing in a quality set of headphones.

But besides that, in this era of ubiquitous quad core CPUs nearing 4 GHz, it'd be difficult to make a plausible case that you need a discrete set of silicon to handle sound processing, even for the very fanciest of 3D sound algorithms and HRTFs. The default, built-in sound chips on most motherboards have evolved from 'totally crap' to 'surprisingly decent' in the last 5 years. It's perhaps too generous to describe PC sound hardware as stagnant it's borderline irrelevant. The very same card was still in my current PC until a few days ago. The last sound card I purchased was in 2006, and that's only because I'm (occasionally) a bleeding edge PC gamer.

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