Back during the pandemic, many people were left at home without any way of enjoying the things they loved doing outside of their homes, so they turned to enhancing their home lives. Many of us were music lovers and since we were spending so much time listening to music on our stereos (not in our cars, head phones, or bluetooth speakers), we started to desire something better than just a Spotify account and some basic speakers to enjoy that music on.
Personally I have always liked the sound of a nice stereo, but things in life took me away from the current audio gear and its nuances. I have a number of vintage components that I enjoy the sound of, especially tube amplifiers. I did not know in what way things have changed over the years, but I will say that the products available for, say, budget or consumer level electronics has gone way downhill in audio quality, making way for convenience and simplicity.
A number of years ago when I was making my work space in the basement of my home, I decided to buy some solid speakers that sounded great and would fill the small space I allocated to work in. After reading several reviews, I settled on a pair of Klipsch R-14M Speakers. They are small, 4” bookshelf speakers, and I assumed they could be driven by any old amplifier. Boy was I wrong, as these babies had to be driven by an amp that had a minimum of 50 watts per channel.
This pulled me down a rabbit hole that lead me to get a special class-D amplifier with a built in DAC. More on that later…