I finally decided to join after doing quite a bit of lurking and researching.

Well, right now my intention is to buy a pair of Shure SE530s. I listen to most if not all of my music from my computer (A Dell XPS 420. I guess you'd call it a sound card or sound controller is the Creative SB X-Fi.) through either Windows Media Player or Slacker Radio/Pandora Radio. I only have CDs on WMA that were ripped in their lossless format.

The type of music I listen to is varied. I listen to just about everything.

For those of you that use it what do you think of Slacker/ Pandora? I don't think it's sounds to bad. If they're any alternatives to these two sites that are better in terms of sound quality and just the general way the site operates, I'd really like to know.

I do have an Ipod but don't have any songs on it as I'm not going to spend the large amount of money it takes to fill it up but I just might decide to start using it more and maybe even buy a Sony MP3 player.

With that said, do you all have any advice for me to get the best sound quality out of the SE530s with what I would be using them with? Is there a need for an amp?

Thanks

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I have the Shure SE530PTH (the 530 with a mic). It sounds fine unamped. For the deepest bass, a good amp can do great things. Because it's easy to drive to begin with, you should make sure the amp you have isn't simply going to increase the volume. After all, the impedence on this IEM is not very high, so more volume is hardly going to help. What you want is clean presentation. Make sure whatever device you get has a line-out so you can bypass the onboard amp.