The (upstairs) reading room audio system
Note: Following the upheavals of the new central heating system back in mid-2010, and my decision to "relocate" much of my new life to the back half of the living room, I have assembled an audio system in what was Christa's study, but which is now a comfy little reading room adjacent to the books warehouse that was my study.
Note 2: I have just relocated the Marantz NR1504 downstairs as I shift the system there towards a more HDMI-centric layout. I have not yet decided how (or even if) to reconfigure the system here as it gets very little use.
[last updated: 29 November 2015]
The living room audio system is shown here.
The Marantz NR1504 unit is actually a fully-fledged 4K (primarily hdmi-based) audio/video receiver,1 but its stereo capabilities do nicely for my pair of ears. After all, about 99.9% of my audio material is either stereo or simple mono. The Marantz has one co-ax and one optical SP/DIF input — just enough for my Freeview2 digital TV box (that I use purely for digital radio) and my CD player. I'm feeding the minidisc recorder's analogue audio output directly into the Marantz, which also has three stereo pairs of analogue audio inputs.
The Marantz also has a front panel socket for stereo headphones. So if I ever find my Sennheiser headphones... Still, I no longer need to cocoon myself in headphones, though they do usually sound marginally better than any other acoustic transducer in the house or my price range.