When someone tells you it's a $40,000 amp, does it sound better?

AMPLIFIERS have to be considered in light of the speakers you pair them with. If the speakers fail to reveal more subtle details on the recording, then the amps do not have to be "quiet enough" to produce that level of detail. In that case you're better off buying a less expensive New amp, or go with an older (but more prestigious) brand that 20 years ago "used to be" a top performer. If you are planning to get much better speakers as soon as you save up the money, and you can get a great amplifier on sale or a demo now, you might consider buying it. The best route is almost always to stop eating out and use your bicycle instead of your car to get around, and get the speakers you feel you will be hanging onto for a long time FIRST. Then buy a NAD, HEGEL (or similar darn good amp (or even a well made integrated) and enjoy your music. And IMO avoid components made abroad which are exotic and exclusive (some reviewers consider them to be "the best") but are simply more expensive for the same performance you can get here. High-End  Audio is about what YOU think sounds really good, but there's always the pressure to get something "the experts" proclaim to be 10th row at Carnegie Hall. Especially when it comes to wire, you know your cables are well made, but are they limiting what gets to your speakers? How much more money should you spend on them?I think of all the years I didn't even think about wire as I enjoyed every minute listening to the same music I still listen to now....

Now you own it, and while listening to it you will always be saying to yourself that thing cost $40,000 and somehow you’ll enjoy it more.

You will enjoy it more because it would be better.

Is it going to be 40x better than a 1k preamp, most likely not, but it will perform way better in areas that a lesser preamp cannot even touch.

The question is would you buy it, if funds allowed, to enjoy it or to show off. I want to believe that many here would buy it for enjoyment.

I cannot understand, while in this passion, some people reject the idea of expensive gear, quite a few of those reflect somehow their value.

Personally i would go for it, i have one in mind, and show a fake invoice to my wife.

A great amp will shine even with modest speakers.  A friend told me about the day he was working at an audio shop where they used a really good amp with a range of lower priced speakers, including a pair of old and battered Polk speakers, and every speaker sounded amazingly good.  That was when he became convinced about how extremely important amps are to the sound.

Possibly my ears can't discern the difference between 20 and 40 thousand. I will be better off with 20 thousand. My only question is how do you listen to all these different sound systems in your room. Tested with the same songs and the same volume, at the same time of day with no invading sounds, at the same temperature and the same amount of drugs in your system. 

I rant!

@jumia 

A good DSP arrangement solves a lot of room problems and equipment problems and is underrated and not fully appreciated.  Probably because the interfaces and the product are so difficult to work with. It's a real pain in the ass to deal with DSP the way it's set up and really shouldn't be.  Mcintosh has a room treatment box that provides no graph before after and no way to make changes and requires microphone for sampling just like everybody else.

My safety net for audio room issues is AccurateSound.ca. The guy running that service has a remote DSP creation service that works well (and easy for the client). I used them for a big speaker in a small room and the results were excellent. I no longer use that DSP (Convolution filter) because I have a small speaker in this room, and it is a seamless fit.

It may sound very nice and very good but I wanna see something and I wanna be able to change something.

I have not tried this new software that AccurateSound has created but they have something to allow you to try different Convolution filters quickly to see how it sounds.

If you are a ROON or JRiver user and are mainly focused on digital streaming audio, then AccurateSound is gold. This is a computer software-based approach to room correction so it will work with all gear. The software they use is very expensive audio software and is very complicated.  I also consider this solution miles more powerful than any DSP stuffed into audio gear (no matter the price of the gear).