I am looking to buy an amp, prefrably second hand, and have spent hours looking at endless reveiws and forum threads but I am still at a loss as to what I should get. I have some KEF Q15s and am going to use a nice big bass amp as a sub and use my computer with a cheap audigy 2 soundcard as the source as I love having access to my whole colection all at once.
I am curently considering an Arcam Alpha 8 which seem to go for A£150ish on ebay, a C320BEE at A£140ish, or maybe even a NAD C370 if i can stretch to A£250ish but there are so many other amps out there I don't know how to decide.
Also I listen to mainly electronic/hiphop/jazzyness/drum and bass and I mostly concentrate on the drums. At the moment I am using the bass amp and PC speakers with 3 different graphic EQs and another 3 or 4 bass/treble boosts to get it sounding nice, which it does a lot of the time, so I'm not sure if these are even the right kind of amps or whether they are more suited to more subtle kinds of music that likes to be played flat, rather than the bass and high treble boosted and 1K cut right down that I have to do right now.
Is there a point where the lossy nature of mp3s (many of which I can't re-record into a lossless format) will make the improvement of a better amp negligible, and should I use some of the money to get a better soundcard.
I hope I have made some sense and would be very gratefull for any help.