Get a pair of decent passive bookshelf speakers, according to your budget. I have Q Acoustics 3020 (around $300) because they fit my budget, and I could try the

Get a pair of decent passive bookshelf speakers, according to your budget. I have Q Acoustics 3020 (around $300) because they fit my budget, and I could try them and liked the way they sounded. But you can find much cheaper and better than the usual desktop speaker kit, or more expensive. That's the most important piece of equipment. For the amplifier, you can get Chinese "full digital amplifiers" (FDA) for ~$150, for example the SMSL AD18. These things are really impressive for the price and size, that one is 2x70W, which is good enough for bookshelf speakers (enough to be uncomfortably loud without distorsion). There is no need for a "control puck" because the amp itself with its volume knob is not that much bigger than a control puck. If you want to go cheaper, there are good enough chip-based analog amps in the same form factor, you can go down to ~$50 with the power supply. It is impressive how good these cheap class D amps can get. A common hack if you don't mind spending some time with a soldering iron is to buy a cheap amp with a good chip on AliExpress or similar and then replace shitty knockoff/underspecced components (ex: capacitors) with good ones. This is often enough to get you to audiophile level quality for a fraction of the price. You don't really need to, the knockoffs components are bad but not that bad, that's only if you are considering $1000+ equipment. Amps are rarely the weakest link nowadays. Speakers and how they are set up are. As for the subwoofer, with good bookshelf speakers, you may not even need one for your desktop. But if you do, you can buy one separately and either connect it to the subwoofer output if you have one on your amp (FDAs normally have one), or, if you go for analog stereo, put the subwoofer between the amp and speakers, most subwoofers have dedicated connections for that (and it is perfectly fine). Edit: ah, yes, cables, in case it wasn't clear, it doesn't matter. For speaker cables, the thicker the better, but with the distances involved, even that is not a big deal. Power cord (ex: romex) is perfect. For interconnects, especially if it is digital, anything goes.