Who Uses A Stereo Anyway?

April 20, 2010, By 14 comments

Who Uses A Stereo Anyway?

Not to be a tech snob or anything, but if you still rely on those stacks of components gathering dust in the corner cabinet in your living room for musical enjoyment, you probably ought to check your VCR to see if your “Facts of Life” marathon taped while you were at Hands Across America.

You don’t have to be a technophile to take advantage of the home stereo options available to you at the local electronics retailer or Costco. And most of them take advantage of your iPod, which basically means you can carry your record and CD collection in your pocket.

But before you update your home listening, consider a few things to make the whole process easier.

  1. Start simple. Look for systems that are ready-made to work with iPod and help connect room-to-room, like the Denon Network Dock. You can keep your old speakers and plug your iPod in and you’re off and running.
  2. If you're looking for amazing clarity and have some extra money to spend, go with something like the Bose SoundDock 10 for Apple iPod. It will run you about $600, but Bose has figured out how to cram a whole lot of sound into a little package. You can put that old stack system on the curb or make a little extra money at a garage sale, just make some room on a bookshelf.
  3. A whole-house networked system, like those made by Sonos, is going to cost you a bit more and require a little more hassle when it comes to installation, but they allow you to set up zones and play different tracks in different rooms at the same time. So it’s Bob Marley on the patio, Barry White in the bedroom and Tony Bennett in the dining room. You have just become the DJ of the House.
  4. If you want to take advantage of your vintage record collection, but in the digital age, look for something like the Black Series MP3 Turntable converter by Shift3. You can keep your original b-sides and play them on your run or during your next grill-out.
  5. Ask, ask, ask. Home stereo systems are like fingerprints, everyone who has them has a different one. Simplifying your home listening by basing it on your iPod makes storage easy, but it opens up a whole world of possibility.

Good listening and good luck.

Craig Heimbuch is the Editor-in-Chief of ManoftheHouse.com and the author of "Chasing Oliver Hazard Perry." He is a Barefoot Proximity employee.

Comments (14):

Erich B. I don't care for Apple or their poor quality products. As for me I have an AVR almost identical to the one in the top photo. It sounds BEAUTIFUL. I use digital connections for every device I can as to preserve as much as much quality as I can. I grew up on tube-based systems so I'm not some young idiot who doesn't know quality sound. - 08/27/2011
Jonathan C. This might be the worst article on the Internet. - 07/01/2011
W David B. Yeah, you can carry your entire collection around in your iPod and it will sound OK played through something. And this will satisfy the listening needs of 90% of today's listening audience. I am not one of those 90 percenters!! Nothing beats a good quality sound system setup in a home. I am not necessarily talking about a megawatt surround sound system, but just a good quality stereo system. I appreciate the evolution of sound reproduction that AVRs have brought to the home enthusiast, but it's not just about the home theater experience. I am sure that technically, the dynamics of music played back on an iPod probably matches LPs of the past and may rival some CDs. But as I have A/B tested these configurations, the iPod does not cut it for me in my home in turns of sound quality. In my car, it is okay and the convenience is hard to match in either setting. I will continue to have a quality sound system based on something other than the iPod. - 04/23/2011
George D. Yeah, that's pretty much terrible advice. Ask anybody who knows anything about sound quality and they will tell you that Bose has been selling poor-quality equipment at absurd prices based on name recognition for years, and that mp3s are the very worst format for music, coming in just above cassette tapes. Keep your home stereo, and if you really want to hook your ipod up to it, there is a stupidly cheap solution. Take an RCA cable from your stereo and put a simple RCA-to-Digital converter (and when I say converter, I don't mean a big box, we're talking the size of a guitar pick) on the end and plug it into the headphone jack of your terrible-sounding ipod. It cost me FIVE DOLLARS, and it comes out through a real set of floor speakers. - 03/10/2011
D W. Good grief, it's one thing to be an Apple fanboy, but this is ridiculous. Good luck connecting your HDMI-based equipment, such as a BluRay player, network streaming device, or even an HD set-top box (cable or satellite) through an iPod. Additionally, most video or audio viewed through an iPod is not full quality. Keep in mind, too, that more than a few companies are still making good quality turntables for those old analog records that are still lingering. My "stack of equipment" in the corner isn't getting dusty; its been supplanted with a nice home theater receiver that manages my A/V equipment just fine, thanks, and the only time anying Apple touches it is when my son hooks his iPod to it. Amazingly, somehow, we enjoy it in spite of its absence of Apple blessedness. - 03/09/2011
Mike A. The author is full of you-know-what, and doesn't know squat about music. Vintage stereo equipment sounds a lot better than the new stuff out there. My 15 year old Pioneer stereo sounds better than any iPod dock station. iPods suck, pure and simple. Yes, they are convienent to have all your music in one location, I have one too. The problem is most of the music ripped to them is in crappy 128 or 256 bit rate. Everything is compressed for space. That's why you can put 10 albums worth of mp3's onto a single cd. - 02/25/2011
Eric V. At risk of tedium, I feel have to third just how resoundingly bad every single piece of advice here is. Of course, eschewing bland, disposable crap is anachronistic, but if you're going to spend upwards of six hundred bucks anyway, you might as well get a decent used receiver and speakers, and hook your soundcard up to your system. Or just plug in your iPod with a 10-dollar cable. Make sure you've got a phono input for an entry-level table like the mmf-2.2 or Rega's. I know the author has to write stuff to make a living, and it's a lot easier to say, "Here's a product you can buy! with a link!" rather than the maddeningly nebulous "scour Craigslist and garage sales" but at least try to make your recommendations BENIGN. - 01/22/2011
Guest G. This is the same type of person who will tell you that there is no noticeable difference in sound between an MP3 and a CD. Terrible advice, across the board. - 01/10/2011
Jonny G. How I listen to music, and what equipment I listen to it on, is affected by how much hardware I can carry to a given location. Given the amount of music you can cram onto a 100 gig hard drive, it's simply amazing that I can carry around my entire library (at 320k) in a package not much bigger than an old-school cassette. But ... there comes a point when my ears simply don't want to tolerate the compression and artifacts of MP3, and the less-than-gorgeous sound of a $50 set of earbuds. (no, I don't travel with my Ultrasone headphones strapped to my laptop bag!) When I'm at at home, and there's no hardware to be transported, it's CDs, HDCDs, SACDs, and DTS DVDs on a good-quality player through a good-quality amp coming out a kick-butt set of JBL Studio monitors. Nope, the system isn't "audiophile" by most standards, but it's liquid gold for the ear-drums compared to the pocket MP3 and earbuds. $500 for a Bose iPod dock? No chance, Daffy English Knigget!! - 12/03/2010
Gary S. I agree completely with Greg B. While a Bose Dock is fine for what it is, the author of this piece is clearly not an audiophile and would be best served to keep his bad advice to himself. Many of us have wonderful 2-channel and home theater applications that could eat the Bose Ipod dock for breakfast, and might not even cost that much more. Incorporating digital music into existing systems is also relatively easy and inexpensive. Bose iPod dock? Don't do it. - 11/29/2010
Greg B. I would suggest that anyone truly interested in good sounding stereo to ignore every single suggestion the author of this piece made and find the poor sucker that is getting rid of his old stack of late 1970's components. A $600 Bose iPod dock? lol - 10/27/2010
No T. Wow. How about no? Is this an article or just an ipod add, not everyone has decided to use ipods so they have to replace all their working equipment with more equipment that does the same thing to attach to their ipod device. - 10/01/2010
Dc I. Wow, what a dumb article. Is the Heimbuch employed by Apple? Does he get a kickback on every ipod that is purchased? Believe it or not, ipods strip out quality and complexity from music tracks. I prefer to let my dusty stack of components do their thing. No need to throw out perfectly good tools just because of some shiney object with a big marketing team behind it. I'll use the pile of $$ I save for a maid to come in and dust for me. ps: My old vcr is long gone. - 09/14/2010
Cy B. You are a tech snob. Your ears have become attuned to the poor quality of iPod music and have lost the ear for the depth and sound of a good hifi. And the whole VCR/"Facts of Life"/hands across thing makes you an arrogant, mean spirited blog boob. Better folks than you know that a good sound system is worth the time and money to opearte and enjoy. - 08/28/2010

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