Your ship just came in! time to buy new gear..?

I'll bite, but I can't bring any special expertise to the table. I'd basically just upgrade with the brands in my current but 15 year old system which sounds great to me.

What I'd get:

Aerial Acoustics 20t speakers
Marl Levinson No. 53 monoblocks
Audio Research Ref 10 pre amp

That's more than $56k so I'd have to buy used in order to afford commensurate cables and interconnects.

Of course the government gets about half of that, so if I had to scale down:

Aerial Acoustics 7T speakers
Levinson No. 534
AR LS-28 pre-amp

And I'd still have to buy used.

So sorry to hear about your aunt and uncle, that was terrible.

56k would be put towards student loans, sadly......

     $56K?

Merrill Audio Element 118 GaN mono blocks  $36,000/pr.


Magnepan 20.7 speakers                                $14,450/pr.
                                  Grand Total  with tax =   $53,981.50

    Per the well known and time honored tradition of rewarding hippos that consume relatives that have you included in their wills, I'd convert all left over cash into steaks as a thank you for having my aunt and uncle over to their home for a meal.
Tim

@n801
its tuff!

... and pursuing a maximum of 2 different things ensures it will be.


@godbles
in this instance, even the Govt. is gonna let you aleviate your grief and wait a bit longer for their money.


@tooblue
Thanks but the Hippos do not seem to be experiencing any negative side effects from ordering off the menu.


@noble100
I like the way you think!

thanks for keeping it to just two items as well.


I thought this thread as a slam dunk 'pick em' deal, until I got to thinking a bit deeper into it.

suddenly you can do something you were unable to do previously. perhaps ever!

maybe, never again!

act and think outside the box for a change?

shoot for that one thing you likely can't ever afford?

try to stretch the dollars on the preowned mkt and nab a couple upscale items?

but which ones?

then I thought it the perfect time to build a dedicated room for listening and or home entertainment.

then came 'bucket list' stuff.

bare in mind then too, what if there is no substantial system in place already? or 'everything' is dated in your rig?

it gets harder to choose.

ad in how quickly tech is advancing in just about every aspect of high end audio and deciding how and where to drop that wad gets still tougher.

blow it all on one IYO great item and you are then chained to it and if bought new, you get to eat the big chunk of depreciation later when you decide to sell it.

if maximizing value and using the used mkt, then which pairs line up in your sights?
Source and amps?

Amps and Speakers?

just speakers?

speakers and source?
etc, etc, etc.

the Hippos had a much easier choice.

The 'two items' limit is an artificial and arbitrary construct. I do what I want with my money.  ;-)

So a cheque for £40k arrives, not from an incident with some hippos but just the result of old age and a heart attack, my mortgage has a year or two to run and I'm only paying 1.1% interest on it anyway so might as well ignore that. My system at the time was all Naim except the turntable so what this Naimie does is replace the 282 preamp with a new 552, that takes care of half of it, it also frees up the supercap to power the superline phonostage. That leaves me with a 250 power amp with sources of a Rock mk2 with a Naim Aro arm carrying a Tranfiguration Proteus and a Naim CDX2 with a 555ps power supply. Round about this time Naim launches their recent Uniti products, Atom etc, it doesn't take much prescience to realise a revamp of their streamers is on the way so I decide to wait for whatever replaces the NDS (which showed promise but didn't entirely convince) as I already have the necessary power supply and I bought a Core to rip my CD and a cheap Rega DAC to use it with in the meantime. Now that leaves me with a chunk of money in the bank and I make the assumption that the new NDS will cost around half of what's left or less so when an Artemis SA-1 turntable catches my eye in a not too distant dealer i go and investigate, it turns out that it belonged to Frank Schroeder who used it at shows and it comes with the offer of jumping the queue for one of his Reference tonearms, the temptation is too much so that is £9k gone but I still think I have enough for the streamer when it comes. Time passes and the new streamers are announced but instead of replacing the NDS Naim come out with the ND555 which is £13000 at launch but at least my existing ps will power it it so I find the extra and order one of those too.
Not strictly to brief but it has the excuse of more or less happening like that. The exception is that it was actually 2 lots of ~£40k a couple of years apart, this first (which was from an aunt) bought me an Indian Roadmaster to suppliment my 1981 Moto Guzzi and my wife insisted on a new kitchen but the second lot and some additional funds were spent roughly as described with the addition of a used 500 power amp which went off to Naim for a service and updating to the latest spec, I've now run out of aunts and parents.
I have absolutely no regrets of any of this but my father's last year was difficult to endure, you can grieve while someone is still alive as you watch them slip away and it's all the more paimful.
I expect this is no use to the Op as Naim prices in the States are a tad higher so his £56K won't go quite as far and I somehow doubt Naim is his thing anyway. The ND555 is a peach by the way but would set you back $30k with the power supply last time I looked.

Add a 10' x 16' x 26' (or so) room with a cement floor onto the house. Folkfreak says that would cost more than $56,000, but his standards are awfully high!

I would add onto my room and have professionals do the room treatment.Then experiment with pricey cables and tubes to my heart's content.

I’d go with too end tannoys ($25k?), denafrips Terminator DAC, and see if I could squeeze some extra for an audio note amp. 

I can't possibly imagine a better use of $56K than to purchase 28 Nord Class D amps at only $2K each.

Only 56K, I wouldn't even bother.

At least they were doing what they loved when they became soup. If I had to buy something audio related then I would probably by a better source then what I have now. Maybe a cable to go along. But after a certain point I am not one who thinks more money buys more, just different. So not to tempted to send my favorite (reads with most money with me in their will)Aunt Gertrude and Uncle Virgil on a surfin and turfin (beach boys related)safari.

56K? ... I wouldn't spend it on audio equipment that's for sure. My system suits me just fine as it is. 

Frank

Death by hippos, that can't be pleasant.

@oregonpapa Agreed. I'd buy more land.

@yeti4235

Thanks for the thoughtful insights on your EXP, and the avenues you pursued.

this is exactly what I felt to bring to light if or when extraordinary circumstances prevail, for what ever reason.

what is the focus then. just a more grandios onslaught yet in the same vein your philosophies have always been intwined?? or bust a dissimlar move?

obviously, the foils I protrayed here which were callously and sumarrily gobbled up were pure fiction and nothing more than a devise introduced to substantiate some possible ‘windfall’ and a subsequent opportunity for self engratiating behavior…

sorry about your notes on the poor family news visited upon you. its never easy, and I suppose its not meant to be so either. .

been there and done that myself.

never had an Indian. had a harley back in the day, and borrowed a friends Moto guzzi now and then when I had a Honda 750 that was being retooled by Yoshimura Racing. an inability to ride remains a strong regret.

Nagra, not Naim does indeed have my attention, yet the named funds won't quite reach their most recent product line completely.

thanks so very much.


@ BDP24

at $50 per Sq. Ft. that comes out to a tad over 20K. 416 SQFT.

of course there are other fees though I felt a decent sized dedicated room a viable option given $50K plus just kicked in your door, and one well worth carefully thinking about, and for a while.


@tpreaves

I can see where you are coming from but there was nothing else to do at the time.