Hopstretch

As much as I'm tempted, you said it yourself before: great, but not a great deal. Nate, I do like the speakers just fine straight from the Duet but I think the headphone amp comes up a little short with the 650s.

Moot point now, but this will be a nice update if it's legit. Still want a 802.11n multitouch tablet for Web browsing in bed, though!

A couple of thousand. Soft constraint, but less is better. I'm not chasing the last 0.0001 percent.

Yes, this could go in any one of several forums, but the amp/preamp choice is probably the heart of the matter, so here it is. I find I do almost all of my listening -- headphone and speaker -- at my desk now, so I'd like to upgrade my current (and, I admit, quite adequate) setup to something with a little more polish. I'm very happy with the Duet and the Senns, so those probably stay. Source is Apple Lossless from the iMac -- secondary goals are simplicity, reasonable component footprint and (again, I admit) good looks. So far I've looked at: -- SE tube head/power amp (Cary SLI-80) to passive monitors (Dynaudio Audience, Totem Rainmaker or similar) -- SE tube head/pre amp (Zana, ??) to active monitors (Dynaudio BM6, Quad 12L etc.) -- New balanced firewire DAC (Mini-DAC) to balanced SS head/pre amp (GS-X, B22, ??) to active monitors. Would be buying used as much as possible for budgetary reasons, which obviously limits choice somewhat. Any thoughts appreciated.

If you're set on an active monitor setup, you could check out the Dynaudio BM6MKII or the Adam A7. Both would probably sell for a lot more outside the pro audio channel. Adam has also just come out with a more consumer-oriented small monitor called the A5 that is getting a lot of buzz. Suspiciously reminiscent (I wonder how much thought went into that model designation) of the very popular Audioengine A5, which is a truly excellent budget choice in this category. If you are just going to run your soundcard straight out to your speakers, I would probably go with the Audioengines and save your money for music. You are not going to get the (frankly incremental) benefit of the higher-end speakers without an external DAC.

Woke up really hungover. Downhill from there. With my share of Aerius's friend's life savings, I'm going to buy Advil.

I'll be in line, though I wouldn't say that early Bad Seeds material is really crying out for a surround mix.

One train of thought following Apple's recent results -- which sent all the analysts into conniptions because of lowered gross margin projections -- is that they are about to start aggressively cutting prices on their laptops to try and cement big market share gains in that segment. See below from one of the more reliable Street guys. If you can wait a few weeks, you may well save some money.