Years ago we went to the Stereophile show in Chicago and heard a lot of nice sounding systems, Back in 1999 we went to the CES show, we listened to 1 million plus setups down to single ended pure class A 2 watt amps running thru very efficient speakers that sounded amazing. All depends on what type of music usually listen to, how big your listening room and pocket book are. AT CES David Wilson had one of his big systems in a huge room with what looked like a couple of prototype sub-woofers that were the size of 30 cu.ft refrigerators, at times you couldn't hear them because they went well below 20hz. but could certainly feel the room shake. Iv'e had bigger systems in the past, currently I listen to a lot of Jazz and Blues so I'm loving a somewhat smaller set of speakers, if you like rock, classical or big band go with a larger speaker.