Appreciate the audio equipment that I already have

After struggling for 2 weeks about whether to spend money on the expansive Bose around ear headphone, I started to realize one things: I really didn't spend enough time to really enjoy music.

I found out that partly the reason why I enjoyed the moment I test-drove the Bose headphone was because I was doing music but ENJOYING the music and nothing else. A lot of time music is background sound while I am doing other things. The only moment that I really pay attention to the music is when I walk from the office to the cafeteria since I have nothing else to do. And that was the moment I found out that my current earbud was inadequate for producing good quality sound.

So I was thinking: maybe besides finding a reasonably priced good sound headphone, I should also consider do something to improve the music listening experience at home.

It nice that I already did some work to move most of my daily task from my noisy desktop to my relatively more quite (but hot, literally) netbook, and I set up the iTune (which contains all the music I care both on PC and on my iPod Classic 80Gb). For some reason my ear gets very sensitive these days, and the hamming sound on the desktop gets very irritating when I am not busily working.

Now all I need to do it find a proper way to output the sound properly.

I have 3 options:

1. Using a pair of Logitech USB based speaker
2. Using the sound output on my Targus USB station and output to my stereo system
   
3. Using the internal headphone out on the netbook and output to my stereo system
   

Option 1 is fine for listening podcast, plus I don't have to turn on the stereo system. Althoght I love the sound of the my 15+ years old JVC stereo system, it does generate heat. So option 1 will be my choice when I just want to listen to audio book and net radio and podcast. However, this is definitely not my best choice for music listening.

Option 2 was out after I did a bit experiment and found out that there's some noise being generated for no good reason.

So I set up Option 3, and everything seems to work fine. There wasn't much noise coming out of the Netbook headphone out after I connected it to the CD input of my stereo receiver. After I turn of the desktop PC, I can fill my room with music without any annoying background noise. And the best part is that I can use my iPod Touch to control the iTune using the iPhone app "Control" (by Apple). I can even search songs using Chinese character input. The experience is simply awesome, and gives me more incentive to put even more music in iTune.

Oh, did I mention that I didn't spend an extra dime to set everything up?