I've got an excellent system I bought in the '80s - Harmon-Kardon amp/receiver and cassette deck, and a Dual turntable. They're collecting dust because digital audio is orders of magnitude more convenient to use, but with every passing year I become more and more disgusted with this apparently-mandatory thing called a "subwoofer."

I've heard and read the "experts" who say the human ear is not capable of discerning the difference between mono and stereo below such-and-such frequency, but I call bunk. I do most of my high-volume listening in the car - because... neighbors - and there is no comparison, sonically, between the "subwoofer" that's built into my new car's system (Bose or not,) and the great old 2-way speaker systems I cycled through during the '70s and '80s, all with full stereo from top to bottom of the frequency range.

The best car stereo I ever had was a brother's hand-me-down under-dash Sanyo cassette deck, I think with something like 12W/channel power, a $100 five-band graphic equalizer with 30W/channel boost, and a massive pair of EPI M120B bookshelf speakers, laying on their backs in the hatch of my '73 Plymouth Duster. They were 2-way speakers with 8-inch woofers, heavy-duty particle board cabinets that weighed upwards of 30 lb. apiece, and they sounded glorious.

Currently the only manufacturer I know that still makes (or recently made) bookshelf speakers with 8-inch woofers is Klipsch. At some point I plan on snagging a pair of those, a pair of good, clean high-powered amplifiers, finding a good, competent car audio installer and having that setup installed in parallel to the factory Bose system, with some kind of toggle to switch it over. It means the loss of significant cargo space in the hatch and the need to get a rear deck fabricated from some kind of acoustically-transparent mesh, but... I've had it up to my ears - literally - with the muddy, one-size-fits-all overbearing thump of the mono "subwoofer."

As for home audio, there are a few albums that never made it to CD and never will (untimely record company demises, simple obscurity, etc.,) so at some point I'll have to spring for an LP-to-digital turntable/encoder. What's kept me from getting one already is the fact that nobody has come close to manufacturing one that encodes at a bitrate anywhere near the resolution of a CD. And I do not want to hear the refrain "Oh, the human ear can't tell the difference anyway." Not an acceptable answer, thanks.

I suppose I could try getting an amplifier for my classic pre-digital turntable, but every time I look into that I wade into a swamp of technical complexity I am not willing to drain.

[D'OH! 'Scuse the book...]

Still have my t/t, speakers, amp and headphones I purchased in 1981 from the BX at Incirlik, Turkey. And about 300+/- albums. Listening to the Moody Blues "On the Threshold of a Dream", now there's a treat. "Ride My SeeSaw", "Timothy Leary". Outta sight, man.