Easy!! IMHO, that depends on 6 simple, elegant criteria:
(0) How good is your hearing? Has it been tested lately?
(1) Is your target live unamplified music or highly engineered rock-type sound? Do you own a variety of instruments you keep as reference, to ensure you don't end up barking up the wrong tree?
(2) Do you want musical transparency, or sheer power that will - or at least can easily - shake the walls?
(3) Do you want to feel like there are instruments playing in front of you, or do you want "an awesome stereo, dude!" that might well exude details?
(4) Does your available space have appropriate acoustics, either to recreate the feeling of a concert hall, or to simply accommodate a 5-piece instrument orchestra?
(5) Do you have others who can blind/double-blind A/B with you, and whose opinions you can use as confirmations or refutations of your hunches?
(6) At what budget? Seriously, I doubt that any $500 stereos will blow away $30,000 audiophile set-ups.
The "correct" answer will depend on your combination of choices from questions above.
I don't proclaim to be an expert, but I will say this:
I have heard many fancy sound systems in many places, and found most sounding horribly unnatural, requiring (re)training, i.e. listening until your mind plays a trick on you: your hearing apparatus adjusts (which may take about 15-30 min). I won't have any of that.
To me, not much matches the realism of Magneplanars; when different guests have avoided walking into my house in fear of 'disturbing people practicing music inside', I knew I had to have been doing something right! Especially when it was none of the baby grand, drum set, lute, guitar and other goodies sitting there that were doing the trick! Having gone through 4 pairs of Maggies over a quarter-century, I am now comfy with my Tympani IV's, driven by a relatively clean and adequate Harman/Proceed "ML" 431 workhorse, a Mark Levinson LNP-2 preamp, a Bryston BDA-1 DAC transforming various digital sources.
In a 45-ft long space consisting of a 14ft wide living-room extending straight (other than a peninsula) into the kitchen, there's a lot of space for my 9ft x 6ft "wall of sound"-waves to harmonize.
Is it live or is it Memorex? My friends get the discerning challenge when I blend live instruments with recordings played at exacting life-like levels. The answer? It's both!
There may be better stuff out there, but I am not jealous.
Hope this helps.
