Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?
High quality floor standing speakers, although I would say the average person can get almost the same QOL improvement from $500 bookshelf speakers.<p>I use them for music, movies/TV, watching videos on YouTube including technical ones, and even occasionally video conferencing.<p>Wearing headphones for more than 30 minutes is fatiguing and uncomfortable for me.  Listening to people's voices on tiny laptop or iPad speakers is even more annoying.<p>Hearing the bass and midrange in people's voices makes them more intelligible, particularly if they have an accent.  It's just 100% more pleasant all around.<p>And this is purely an aesthetic thing, but it's crazy to me that people seem to listen to music through their phone speaker, let alone their laptop speaker... to me it's unrecognizable.<p>----<p>Most people seem to be using the bluetooth speakers these days, which ~10 years ago were extremely bad IMO.  Admittedly I found one that is pretty good recently.<p>But I still think it's very much worth it to have real speakers with drivers, speaker wire, and an amplifier in your home.  (Or a powered speaker, although your options are more limited there, and it's more expensive.)<p>For traveling the right bluetooth speaker can be alright (there are many bad ones), but after a week of traveling my ears are "relieved" when I get to hear real audio again.<p>----<p>Also: a single kettlebell for ~$45, which I almost think of as a stretching/circulation device, and a bicycle used for 10+ years.