Over the last year I have been getting back into audio hardware. I have always dabbled, bought the odd DAC or headphones, but for over two decades I have not bought anything really substantial. I haven’t even had a dedicated audio system in the house for close to a decade.
Somewhere in the eighties I bought a Kenwood amplifier and CD player. I added some floorstanders by Magnat. I was 16 and proud of my first audio system. The Kenwood amplifier was quite well reviewed.
Somewhere in the 2000s I ditched my audio system. I don’t remember why. It probably had something to do with moving to a smaller place. In 2009 I added a pair of AudioEngine A5’s to my Mac Pro and enjoyed them for quite a while.
A couple of years later, fed up with the sound of my tv, I added AudioEngine A5+ speakers to my tv through an AudioEngine D1 DAC.
Then in 2016 I bought a Dragonfly Red DAC and a pair of Shure SRH1540 headphones. The sound quality was lovely. To my untrained ears tight and detailed.
In February 2019 I replaced the AudioEngine DAC connected to the tv in the living room with a Bluesound NODE 2i. This allowed me to stream hires audio in the living room to the AudioEngines.
Later that year I gave into a slight obsession with open headphones. I bought a pair of Sennheiser HD 660 S headphones and I couldn’t resist adding a Chord Mojo DAC to the order. To my ears quite a step up from the Shure and Dragonfly.
Having achieved a certain level of audio quality in the headphone department, my mind started to shift to a serious audio system.
In the next blog posts I will write about my journey towards a new audio system for the living room.