What makes up an

This has come up time and again in one form or another. High end audio begins with good equipment that does not necessarily cost a lot.

In my opinion you're in high end with something as simple as used Vandersteen 2C, a Jolida (or equivalent) and a decent CD player. That means investing as little as $1500.00 and your miles ahead of the boom boxes sold at electronics stores.

Of course you can spend almost any amount of money, the sky is the limit. I'm sure there are systems at 2 million and above. However, I've heard entry level systems that I could listen to all day and $700,000.00 systems that made me grit my teeth.

What's hard is getting high resolution pieces that integrate properly, have pleasantly accurate tonal balance and dynamics but still immerse you with the emotion of the music.

Often as we spend more and more money we get resolution and bandwidth at the expense of musicality. Maintaining all of these factors in an expensive high resolution system is a challenge and those that fail at the balancing act wind up with a very expensive system that's less fun than a starter system.

Albert, well done! To my mind you set the right accents just where they belong and as you so rightly say, the balance between resolution and bandwidth and forgetting all about sound and being drawn into the music is the more difficult the more revealing your system becomes to be. To my mind, the right balance can only be achieved, if you are intimately familiar with all kinds of live music and only after a lot of hard work.

I can't tell you what it is or exactly what it takes - but it is immediately recognizable when you hear it.

there should be some objective criteria, including construction and parts. there should also be some standards of performance.

otherwise, it becomes a matter of opinion.

for example, i don't consider an oppo dvd player as "high end". however, there may be some disagreement .

without some "hard" confirming evidence, the term could be added to a list of debatable and ambiguous audiophile terms.