Stop and Listen Closely

With a basic price range in mind, it's relatively easy to take a close listen and evaluate different pieces of equipment to get an idea of what your money will get you. Audio experts say it's best to think about the sound, rather than the price, when you're actually sitting in a store's listening room.

Prices of digital music servers, which are spurring a renewed interest in home audiovisual equipment (along with advances in television technology -- a whole other story) run between $300 and $800. Brent Butterworth, who edits The Robb Report Home Entertainment and has tested thousands of pieces of stereo equipment, says most well-known home electronics manufacturers such as Marantz, Denon, Kenwood and Sony all offer these at-home boxes, which will digitize all of your compact discs and also enable you to put computer music files on your home entertainment system.

"For about $800, you can get something really nice," he says.

Fans of portable players can create wireless connections or just plug directly into their home components. Apple now offers the $129 AirPort Express box, which creates a wireless connection between its popular iPod digital players and a home stereo.

Getting in at the low end of other high-end audio components -- amplifiers, compact disc players and speakers -- can cost as little as $1,200, or as much as a person wants to spend, says Michael Nadler senior salesman at Sound by Singer, one of a handful of high-end audio stores in New York.

So, armed with a handful of compact discs and an open mind, I listened to a handful of systems at the store. As advised, I brought music with female vocals, low bass and lots of cymbals to test the high, middle and low tones of what I like. Maybe it was the rare chance to turn up the music loud at work, but everything I listened to sounded rich and full, though there were differences in quality -- and they did happen to correspond to price.