Your greatest high end audio purchase!!!

Enjoying this post everyone. I don’t cycle gear much, tending to get gear that sounds good to me on a limited budget and listen to it for a long time. But sticking with the “greatest hi-end purchase”  question, it was buying a pair of Quad ESL 63s a few years ago. I joined AGon in order to buy them and got them from a great seller for a good price. Turning up the volume on these was a revelation. I never knew recorded music could sound that real. 
 

That purchase sent me down the electrostatic road to a pair of Sound Lab M1s and a pair of MC2500s bridged for 1000 watts. (The SLs are hungry.) All bought used. My wife, a singer, after listening for an afternoon, thanked me for buying them.  

I am going to cheat and answer this a little differently.  I am going to answer the question of "what was the most important audio purchase I ever made"?. 

The answer was a pair of Thiel 2.0 speakers in 1985.  Not that they were all that great but the options back then were pretty limited. What they did do was start me on the road to being a dedicated "follower of fashion", whoops I mean a dedicated follower of the Thiel brand.  I am now on my fifth and last generation of Thiel speakers,  the 3.7's, which are phenomenal speakers.  It is was great loss for the audio community the day Jim Thiel died.

I would say speakers I've had for 22 years would be qualify as a pretty good investment, and those would be a combination of the amazing 10" driver Innovative audio Cabinet speakers and Sub-table and the equally amazing Acoustic Research Phantom 8.3 low slung surround speakers. 

More recently would be the Oppo 205 of course, the best Blu-Ray player ever made even even today it can't be matched because of some of its features and even the DAC was state of the art six years ago (and still used in current components)

Last but not least is the glorious Audio Research MP1 100% analog multi-channel preamp.  This thing is built like a tank with a circuit board that looks like it was constructed by hand with individual daughter board per channel--and sounds equally sensational.   As long as I stay in the far superior sounding analog world, it's not going anywhere!

And finally for headphones, the drop-dead gorgeous titanium-infused Final Sudio Sonorous X cans that look is good as they sound. One of the most underrated products ever released in my opinion.

Easy one for me. I purchased a used PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC for an extremely reasonable price. Ok it was a steal. Everything was fine until I would stream songs in different formats (flac, then dsd, then aiff). Each time it switched formats there was a very loud POP through the speakers. It concerned me enough that I contacted PS Audio. The rep on the phone was very helpful but couldn't resolve it over the phone and suggested I send it in. So I packed it up and off it went. They ran through a battery of tests and found nothing wrong. So back it came but upon hooking it up there it was again. Another phone call and back it went. This time Ted Smith took a look, another round of tests, and the call came back that everything was functioning as should with that unit. They were going to send it back again but I took a shot emailing Paul McGowan and explained that although the unit sounded amazing when playing music it was the transition that I thought could ruin my speakers and I would probably have to sell it and look at another brand. Paul immediately responded that he would look into it. Shortly after, he responded again and said he had met with everyone involved in the troubleshooting and said they all came to an agreement. Would I be interested in straight up trading the Perfectwave for a brand new Directstream? Are you kidding? I didn't even buy this from you. I got it used for a small fraction of what you wanted new. Paul's explanation?  "You are part of our audio family now."

Who gives customer service like this?!? Amazing company.

Magnepan Tympani 1-D's and a Mark Levinson 23.5 started it all for me 25 years ago.  I later went vintage with a Marantz 7c, 5's, 8b, 10b, SLT-12, driving JBL Hartsfields.  My favorite system of all~