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Friend needs advice for $8,000 system

My friend is starting out from scratch with an $8,000 budget. He listens to all sorts, but mainly indie rock. He's keen on the Magnepan .7 speakers and lives in a small apartment, so listening room about 4x3 metres. Don't worry about cables. We just need a power amp, a turntable, a cartridge, a phono stage, NOS tubes, and a DAC.


How do we achieve:


Truthful tonality/timbre


Truthful harmonics


Liquid sound


Transparency


Speed/Dynamics/Pace/Rhythm/Timing


Soundstage Coherence



All for $8,000 new.



Cheers!


uberdine
tomic601's avatar
tomic601
12,976 posts
 
@phcollie recommended a very competent system. The odyssey integrated, while all SS would save you some coin and allow a low end tube phono stage. Ignore the ego driven personal attacks. Music is rarely about that kind of thing, or should be.
tomic601's avatar
tomic601
12,976 posts
 
Another possibility is a nice SP series ARC preamp with built in fet/tube phono. The last one I bought was $1250 with checkout by my favorite tech. add a stout but classic power amp - say a recapped Bryston, the Chord DAC and a Rega 3 table and you might get close to budget. 
uberdine OP
100 posts
 
Wow. Thanks for the help all.

tomic601, goheelz and phcollie, that's pretty much what I'm thinking, a mixture of all your recommendations. Thanks!
Post removed 
honeyberk
2 posts
 
A friend of mine just helped me get set up for about $5k with the .7s, though I went for a SACD player and not a turntable (plus additional for upgraded power cables, interconnects, etc.):

Maggies - $1,500
Used BGW 500D amp from eBay (prev. owned by a church!) - $250
Custom built QA-112-Mk3 preamp from Space-Tech Laboratory - $850
Bluesound Vault 2i streamer/CD ripper with 2TB drive - $1,300
Used McCormack UDP-1 Deluxe SACD player (one owner) - $650

Either way, the Maggies will make him really happy, as long as he feeds them well! :)
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