Happy to share!

Main Amp - Denon PMA-600ne (Love It!!)

That is also run to a second cheaper Onkyo TX-8555 amp (this is my second level garage sale special).

Denon runs two Polk tsi-500 floor standing speakers.

Onkyo runs two chest level wall mounted Totek Mite speakers on the rear wall to the left and right if my couch. They are tied in quite a bit, and when I use them they are maybe 60% the volume of the front Polks. Somehow on recordings with good stereo separation only certain instruments will hover around these little speakers, but very clearly present.

Denon 45f turntable with a Nagaoka MP-200 stylus.

Sony CDP-C725 cd player.

The cool thing I lucked in to is that when I balance the two-way front speakers on their amp with the two-way rear speakers on my other amp on a lot of stereo recordings from the 60’s & 70’s it yields a very 3-D, very clear separation where say piano is over my right shoulder, drums over my left shoulder, guitar right front, bass mid-left front and vocals mid-right front. It can be a bit startling sometimes and really fun :-)

I used to have that feeling, with a smaller budget. I went through a round of discarded gear before landing at my happy place.

Started with garage sale components and one at a time upgraded my speakers, turntable, amplifier and cd player. Then upgraded my turntable stylus and later got 2 good headphones.

It was fun sometimes, and other times confusing. But over about 5 or 6 years I got everything set up just so and now have about $4000 in a system that an audiophile friend and a sound engineer friend both have complemented with wide eyes and big smiles :)

I do remember the feeling of anxiousness when auditioning competing sets of speakers or researching turntable styli. Basically what ended that mental loop of me was when I heard a Scott Hamilton live jazz club recording and I could hear different people clapping from different parts of my listening room, and Scott says something from the stage and a shiver went down my neck because I felt where he was in my living room.

The intrusive thoughts played now and then when I would flip past YouTube reviews of gear, but I asked myself (sometimes out loud), “Do I love what I hear?” Since the answer is yes I just look through my music collection and savor the ‘yes’.

Best wishes!

On the one hand yes, it’s weird. On the other hand, we’re humans, nuanced and sentimental, emotional creatures… and so this is a way for us to experience being human.

What you are calling ‘highest quality’ misses the mark for many music lovers and audiophiles. Many of us want the richest emotional experience we can get to carry from the musicians and singers in the studio or concert hall to our listening room.

That can include a whole environment of factors. The physical media, the album art, the act of flipping through albums, the ritual of setting up the turntable with the record, hearing the stylus drop, the mental and emotional space that come with that deep breath we take just as we hear the music start on side 1, the meditative depth of experience as this side of a particular album plays only these songs in only this order for only this length of time, the depth and nuance of this particular reproduction of this music through these speakers or headphones and all the care we have put into each piece of equipment and this listening room, and the contemplative space and emotional afterglow when the tone arm returns to it’s cradle.