Quote: When it comes to cables affecting sound quality. It's a very subjective topic! As long a the belkin's are well built they should be sufficient for your needs.

Quote:   That's just a recommendation that the speaker can handle up to 200 watts. But you can certainly use a low power amp especially if the speakers are easy to drive. Which the Athena's appear to be.    

Quote: The amp has to be integrated with a pre-amp and you can use it in lieu of a receiver which is an integrated amp with a built in am/fm tuner.

Quote: Hehe, I used to get dizzy playing that game on my PC!

Quote: As others have suggested, if you do your research, the used market might be your best option to get value in a good pair of speakers. But you have to determine whether you want to buy one with a built in amp, or if you already have an amp/receiver you open up the possibilities...

  Quote: Unless budget is an issue, I'd rip all my CDs to lossless to preserve the original quality of the recording. I would assume that all lossless formats would sound the same if outputted correctly by the software.

Quote: What feature(s) does this software provide over foobar2000 that makes the sound better in your opinion?

Quote: The way the speaker is positioned, it looks like the palms of the hands will be covering it when you use the mouse. So i don't see how you can get decent audio from that setup.

Quote: I don't think you PM6400 has inputs to accept coaxial and optical S/PDIF output. You will probably need to add a Stereo Audio Cable - 3.5mm Male to 2x RCA Male to connect your sound card to your amp. You would need to buy speaker wire to connect the speaker to your amp.   Get...

Quote: As others have suggested, you have to decide whether you want to go the bookshelf route or floorstanders. Floorstanders due to their size would typically give you better bass response but are larger and may not be compatible with the asthetics of your decor.   You will likely...

Quote: I believe the CB-20 are rear ported, so you might want to keep them from being too close to the walls. If your speakers came with foam port plugs, you could try plugging them into the ports to see if they improve the sound quality.  

Quote: I've never heard or read of an incident unshielded speaker damaging a computer's hard drive. I don't think the magnets in the speakers would be strong enough to erase the data. But I'd agree that if you can avoid putting the speakers from being too close to your computer, then...

Thanks for sharing the link to the latest review!

Quote: I'm not sure what to make out of The Absolute Sound's articles on computer audio. In part three, they claimed through their testing that "Flac sounded worst than Wav." I'm still trying to figure out how this logically would make sense. Anyway, I don't want to to derail this...

I personally use foobar2000. It "free" so you can try it and see how you like it. It also allows a lot of customizations if you like to tweak.   http://www.foobar2000.org/