@high-amp Maybe you could elaborate more on the particulars of your system.
The Alon VMkIII speakers I hinted about above (which Carl M helped me upgrade to Circe) are known for their spatial presentation and are much better suited to tubed power amps IMO. However, they also need power to come alive so I provided the power but in the form of solid state amplifiers, which never achieved the magic I wanted in my system. If there is a lesson here, IMO it is to get your speakers and amplifier(s) right first. Front ends have changed the most over the past 20 years so to me those seem easier to change and tweak. If the room is good, and you have components and speakers that sound good to you, then cables and tweaks are sort of the icing on the cake, again IMO. Don’t expect cables or tweaks to “totally transform” the sound of your system - for example, they cannot change the basic characteristic sound of your speakers.
Dealers are sort of a polarity. On one hand, you can actually hear the stuff before buying but on the other hand you generally hear what their shop sells and what brings them good margins. I have friends who are dealers but I haven’t set foot in a stereo shop in 15 years because I refuse to waste their time. However, I did select my first upper end speakers that I really enjoyed, ADS L810s, by listening at several dealer show rooms but times were different then. I stupidly sold the L810s for much less than I should have but later decided to find out what the designer (Michael Kelly) had been up to. Of course, he owns/runs Aerial Acoustics so I sold the Alons and bought a pair of Aerial 9s. I knew I was on the right track but I sort of got sidetracked on the amplifier side with a series of Class A amplifiers (i.e., Lamm and Clayton) that, while they sounded great on a lot of music, didn’t quite drive my core rock/blues music as it needed to be driven. I owned Clayton M300s twice and they absolutely nailed the tone and dimensionality (so real sounding on so much music!) plus they had enough power (300 wpc), but couldn’t quite achieve the drive and dynamics that are important to me. That really stood out one holiday when a relative said, put on some rock and “let’er rip.” Unfortunately, it just didn’t rip. I shortly thereafter called Steve McCormack and said, uh, you know that amplifier project you have been trying to talk me into......Steve and Patrick at SMc Audio did a stellar job for me and the result has been an excellent blend of power, tone, and dimensionality that easily handles a wide range of music. I think they are in the range of 600-700 wpc and the Aerials put all that power to good use.
Another thing that worked well for me was upgrading the Aerial 9s to a pair of Aerial LR5’s, which Mike Kelly says “are about as good as it gets from 40hz up.” I added two SW12 subs to fill in below 40hz and the result with the SMc amps is exactly what I was trying to achieve. I am still tweaking around with springs, decoupling speakers, and some other stuff but, as I said above, those things are mostly icing on the cake, which may or may not improve things but will not change the basic character of what I hear. I hope this system discussion has provided the type of insight you were looking for.
