It is an interesting paradox that although the digital audio never loses quality no matter how cheap your hard drive is, you will always need a good stereo to make it sound great.
More along this line: you can record a guy playing a $150 guitar with a $5 microphone, but after all it will take a $500 pair of headhphones to hear the riff exactly as it was recorded. This is the biggest predicament of audiophile technology, that our ears remain the most unreliable interface, the weakest link.
If you haven't noticed yet, we are living in a digital world, where most of our music is stored in digital formats, and thus reproduction and copying of digital data has become an inherently lossless process. Technology got us used to the fact that digital copies, be it images, songs or videos, never lose quality, and are on par with the original. Moreover, whether you send the HD video over a $10 HDMI cable or over a $300 one is totally irrelevant to the quality of the image (though I know there are thousands of radical audiophiles and tech junkies who would immedately try to debunk this notion). As much as I usually mock audiophile revelations though, I believe there is still some merit in buying a good pair of on-ear headphones.
