Your current computer audio setup? (feel free to post pics)

[wilky61]

Hi guys,

Maybe I'm a little bit late checkin' out the scene, but I see we have a brand spanking new audio board on the forums... Nice! In the interest of sparking later discussions, I am curious to survey the posters in the community here to see what kinds of setups we each have, how we each listen to music, and so forth...

I have a fairly new HP laptop that I purchased with a vague sort of idea in mind to turn it into a music computer, and in hindsight I realize that laptops probably don't make the best music computers due to their limited audio output options (e.g., my laptop only has USB... anybody else's have anything more exotic?)

Given my current situation/budget, I figured my best option was to go the headphone route rather than the desktop/surround speaker route. My current rig is in my signature, and this playback is way more detailed than I had ever experienced before (in fact, it makes listening to music in my car a bummer, haha). I'm just using interconnects from Monoprice.

I did a lot of fooling around with different Windows settings and music players (e.g., tried Foobar2000, settled on MusicBee) in order to send the unaltered bitstream directly to my (asynchronous) USB DAC at 24 bit/96 kHz via Windows Audio Session API (WASAPI). Some of my FLAC files are 24/96; most of them are like 16/44.1. I need to convert more of my music over to FLAC and delete my old MP3s, though...

Anyway, here's a photo of my first foray into the world of high quality audio... I don't use the desktop speakers atm, and the photo is slightly outdated because I have since switched music players, but you get the gist.