The NAD systems like Catfish is talking about were excellent and had great sound qualities. Likewise, Klipsch always built fantastic speakers and sound systems. The setup Rockstar is talking about is awesome in what they can do. For the living room, we bought an Onyko TX-NR 535 a number of years ago. It is Blutooth and Wifi enabled. It sounds Ok.
To date, we have never used those features. It's an AV receiver. I have it tied in to the TV and can do theater things with it. However, that's dependent on speakers
placements and acoustics as well. We have really only used that a few times as well. It has Dolby and DTS formats as well. Since I have many CD's, we do like the five disc CD / DVD Carousel player that we have paired with the system.
It also has a USB port. I have music on a 128gb memory stick in various sub music folders and put that in a big music folder and plug it in. It literally could play for days. The bad part is that all settings have to be done on the TV through the remote control.
Skybird had mentioned recording CD's and no loss of quality. I would say that's dependent on the software suite. The software I have used in making CD's creates very " sterile " examples as the software wasn't able to differentiate between anomalies in the recordings and the subtle nuances originally in the songs itself. This might help explain why there is a resurgence in people going back to vinyl albums and turntable production. I have turntables and albums as well.
I believe if you have good pieces of equipment with low signal to noise loss ratios and harmonic distortion levels, it hardly matters how old the equipment is. Pair that with good speakers and you're in business. I know a number of Audiophiles that use analog equipment and get great sound out of their systems. The only other consideration is the space available, needed and used, as Skybird said.
Thanks for the comments and suggestions, everyone.
