Audiojoy4,
It would be hard to come up with good recordings if not I would think. If the stuff used to make and monitor the recordings were not good, that would surely cramp the home listener's style. Having good home equipment might be considered overkill.
The dbx is an old school analog device that was popular and sold commonly in home audio shops mainly in the pre-digital analogue days, along with tuners, phonos, and tape players. They can be had used these days for just a few hundred dollars and a properly functioning unit will work even better with digital sources when needed.
That's not to say that there are not other probably superior newer digital domain processing devices out these days that can provide greater flexibility and effectiveness when applied correctly.
I'm convinced that a lot of the magic associated with the better digital players, the DCS of the world for example, has to do with how the raw data coming from the source is processed in the digital domain. I haven't had the time to experiment, but I'm certain there are excellent outboard digital processors available to anyone today capable of applying various noise filtering and signal enhancement algorithms to digital sources in a similar manner at lower cost for those adventurous enough to give it a try. Playing with digital signal processing devices on my system is on my list of things to do someday when I have the chance.
