What Is Most Important?

small pre-birthday dinner party last night

5 of us actively picking favorites from my cd/sacd collection for 4 hrs. what a mixed bag, what a blast.

am I the only person who mentioned sharing the music with friends? (as produced by our wonderfully assembled systems).

my new to me Sony xa5400es player sounded awesome, and, I pushed the speakers back to make more room around the table and 'found' a very nice l/c/r distribution for several off center listeners. today I will compare it to my prior 'two person' toe-in position.

The media is the largest changing variable in how any system performs. IMHO 

@nutty

The media is the largest changing variable in how any system performs. IMHO

I’d agree also.

There’s a huge market in reissues and remastering, and just once in a while, they get it right.

I’m not sure about classical releases but with pop, more often than not, the original CD issues from the 1980s still remain the best.

A good example is the Beatles, where more or less everything after Revolver is best found on the original 1987 releases.

With classical, I suspect that since far more care was taken of the original recording quality, subsequent remastering is usually less of a concern.

Disappearing act, that a well setup system does. This is most important to me.

@cd318 - indeed there are some decent releases from the 80's, but there are bands like Midnight Oil, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Metallica, and loads of others whose mid-80's released CD's are horrible - low volume and compressed to death. Fortunately re-masters have come out of all of these....