Background: Seven years ago I owned an old Yamaha M-80 poweramp,
Paradigm Monitor 9 speakers and a denon CD player and 'decent' cables.
Unfortunetly I sold everything and haven't had anything near as good
since. I haven't even heard music on anything that good in awhile and
being a music lover and audiophile have totally had the sound of that
system stuck in my head and have been missing it.

Now: I'm in a position to spend money on an audio system again but
don't have that much money to spend. All I want to do is listen to
music on CD's and maybe 2 channel DVD's. If I remember correctly the
cables and cd player had very little if any difference in sound (at
least from what I could hear) from what I was using previously in the
above sytem. The speakers and then the amp made a BIG difference. I'm
kind of set on getting the same speakers and amp unless someone has
rec's in the same price range for something better? I'm kind of
skeptical about cables and such.. I don't want to spend money on some
fancy cable if a radioshack cable will sound the same. Have there
been any real scientific studies of this kind of thing somewhere? Also
I figure most CD players must at least sound similar. What about
DVD/CD players? Any good recs for cheap CD players that sound good
(used are ok)? I'm wondering what the minimum I could spend to get the
above mentioned amp and speakers to sound good. I would do tests at a
showroom or something but I don't think it would be very scientific (I
would know which is which I guess). I get a feeling that this question
might be controversial in some way. However, I'm not trying to stir up
trouble, I just want to know where to put my money. Thanks for any
help.


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