 Everyday, millions of people walk down the street listening to ordinary streaming services on ordinary headphones. Well, recently with the launch of Tidal, the dream of high quality streaming audio is here. And it got me wondering, what else can you do to improve your personal audio experience? Turns out, quite a lot. The challenge with high quality personal audio is that you have an entire pipeline that you have to deal with. And you have to fix every part along that pipeline to make sure that the highest quality sound is getting from the source material to your ears. And that's where a service like Tidal comes into play. Tidal offers uncompressed audio. They give you a giant file that's many times larger than a file that Spotify or Ardeo would give you. But the trade off is that you get maximum clarity. It's an uncompressed, lossless file. It is more expensive, and the interface isn't as good as something like Spotify or Ardeo. In fact, it's downright bad in places. But if you want a high quality streaming library with something the size of Spotify, Tidal is a no brainer. The next step in the pipeline is you need to find a way to turn that digital file into an analog signal that the headphone can understand. And that's where a digital to analog converter, or DAC, D-A-C, as it's sometimes known, and an amplifier come into play. Now your laptop, your desktop PC, even your phone have these built in. But as you can imagine, they're not the highest quality components. That's where external units come into play. You can spend literally thousands upon thousands of dollars on these. The sky's truly the limit. This particular set that I have here only costs a couple hundred dollars, but truly you can spend 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars or more on these. Most of the money will go into the amp. Now I'm sure you've seen units with these glowing vacuum tubes on the outside. Some are enormous. And yes, these are all things you can buy. This one isn't very big. It does have a tube in it, believe it or not. But you can buy very, very large ones, and it's very subjective. This is probably one of the most influential parts in the entire pipeline in how your music will actually sound. Now the final part of the pipeline before the sound actually enters your ears is, of course, the headphones. Now the phones that I'm wearing here are Audeze LCD-Xs that retail for about $1,700. I know your heart is stopping right now. You don't need to spend this much to get a really good set of headphones. And of course, just like the amplifier, it's a very subjective thing. But you can spend just as much money as you want to. And that's pretty much it. As long as you address those individual pieces of the pipeline, I guarantee you you're going to get better quality sound. I've done some blind tests here in the office. Everyone can tell the difference. It's a real thing. And we're seeing this uptick in interest in high quality audio right now. We have devices like Neil Young's Pono coming out in the first quarter of 2015, and this here Sony player that just recently came out. They're both focused on high quality audio. And you don't have to spend a few thousand dollars to make any of this happen. Of course, you can if you want to. That's what audiophiles do. There's an entire universe of ridiculously expensive hardware to buy if you have that kind of money. But for instance, instead of spending $1,700 on these headphones, you can spend $300 on these Sony's, or you can buy a $100 Fiyo headphone app. Either way, trust me, your ears are going to thank you.