santacruzer

Hey All - Great site. Some of you may shudder at my questions, but i'll do it anyways! So a while back I decided I wanted better sound than my computer speakers. I went a little overboard for my listening needs and bought a Scott 355R solid state receiver, klipsch RSX-4 speakers, and a musical fidelity v-dac - it was most certainly better than my computer speakers There are two things now: I purchased a macbook air with very little storage as my main computer and have no regrets about it. I do not want to use an external device to store music - I want to keep things simple. Also I am moving increasingly to streaming music from pandora or grooveshark, not real high quality but the cost and flexibility win for me. I am feeling like since I watch streaming tv and music this whole setup is kind of pointless and also much more complicated than I want - I am not really a huge fan of hooking up my music through the usb for one thing (not the biggest deal, but it just annoys me), for the other the receiver takes up a fair amount of space, and there are just a crapload of cables all said and done between all these devices. I want less stuff generally. So here is what I was thinking: after looking around I am most interested in audioengine a5 or a2 speakers. Simple, and I can plug my ipod into it as well - plus looks are important to me and these things are beautiful. For my needs should I get rid of the v-dac as well? Will it improve the quality of the sound if i'm streaming or listening to fairly low quality files to begin with? If the difference would be insignificant to me i'd rather get some extra bucks and buy my girlfriend some flowers. What do people think generally about my thought process? Am I making sense? Your help is appreciated! Thanks, Jacob

Hey Guys, Great forum, but absolutely overwhelming for a total nube. My father distributed Hi-fi when I was a kid and I didn't know it, but I was completely spoiled listening to great sound systems. I never learned anything about it and years later, i'm a college student listening to music on a pair of computer speakers. I still love music on them, but it's so bad I finally decided to do something about it. After digging around here, I decided I finally just need to make some decisions and get some good sound going. I'm working on a very small budget so I was hoping for some feedback on what people think about this. Obviously it isn't going to be what some of these folks are putting together, but I would appreciate some general feedback on what i'm thinking: I have a macbookpro I want to connect it via usb to a musical fidelity v-dac connect that to a vintage receiver (example would be a marantz 226 i'm looking at on craigslist) and lastly a decent pair of bookshelf speakers (looking at a pair of Celestion 1's on craigslist too) Would appreciate general criticism/feedback of what i'm doing - don't know much about matching speakers to receiver. Keep in mind i'm not going too crazy here (you're probably saying "duh" to yourself), just trying for a huge huge improvement over computer speakers. Thoughts? Thanks in advance. Jacob