@mrdon
Solid gold decisions are tough to make and i appreciate "the angst" that goes into decisions such as these as well as anyone else.
This guy gets it :-)
While I love reading about people with huge budgets, amps that cost more than the speakers, or even cables that cost more than the speakers, that's not what I want. I love music, and I want to set this system up right, but I'd love to set it and forget it for at least 10 years. I'd rather lease another car than spend 30k on cables. For this setup (802+McIntosh), I was looking at finding used Kimber cables at reasonable prices. All in, I suspect this setup will run me a little less than 40k (half of which is the speakers).
Again, thanks everyone for input. At least for me, right now, it's a pretty big financial commitment, so I want to make sure I wasn't overlooking something obvious. To be honest, I could probably just listen to my 805+Rotel+sub setup for 10 years and still be pretty happy.