Babies and Speakers

Every baby will be different. I was in your shoe about 4 years ago. We live in the Silicon Valley, so houses are fairly small in comparison. We kept our main system in the living room, while I converted our guest room into the baby's room. And with that, my second system got disassembled, and turned into a headphone based system in my study room. We read all the horror stories and saw all the funny videos on TV where babies fed cereals to the VCRs, etc.

I thought the day of me listening to my main system was over, so I was really into building up my headphone gear. Well, now I have 3 headphone amps and 3 pairs of headphones, I don't ever use them. I've been back at listening to my main gear, mostly late at night when my wife and son go to sleep. Yeah, I don't crank it up that loud, but still pretty good listening level. If you train your kids from the start, they will sleep through everything. Take them out to cafes and noisy restaurants, let them sleep while you enjoy a nice meal or a cup of coffee. Walk through the malls while they sleep in the stroller. Get them used to loud noises early. Worst thing you can do is to train them to sleep only when the environment is quiet.

My son enjoys the music with me some times too, but mostly he's in the back playing with his toy while I have my system going. But these days more CD then LPs as more often than not that I'm playing with him or running around doing stuff.

All my gear are in open racks. I had supervised my son to turn on/off stuff for me. So the novelty worn off early on, and he never touched anything again. I got him a little CD player hook up with a pair of computer speakers in his room. He considers that his system. So he plays with that most of the time. But once in a while he would ask me to play something on "daddy's system", and we would enjoy it together.

FrankC

I believe music is good for mental development. It's a complex stimulation that gives the brain a workout. Helps in getting those neurons and synapses all connected and fired up. However, be very, very careful of volume. Their hearing is much more sensitive than an adult's, especially with higher frequencies. You don't want to contribute to the child having premature hearing loss.

there is no harm, as long as it's not rap...

My wife always used a noise machine to play some sort of static or sound to block out the world so the baby would sleep. These are great (waves, birds, static, wind...).
Want one really cheap, we are done with ours?

it was so long ago my recollection is weak (my kids are now 25 and 23), but listening volume was never a problem for me when my kids were infants. In fact, my oldest son would fall asleep whenever we turned on the vacuum cleaner!

The bigger issue for me was I little to had no time to listen. I ended up putting my energy/money into the best car stereo I could manage since I have a 50 minute commute, this was my listening time.