Throwing 2 High End brands together will not automatically equal success. Thoughts?

Well if said "high end" brand isn't actually as high end as they claim then yes you'd have a terrible time.

But anyway this is the hierarchy of what is important imo and with workable experience and evidence to back it:

Room/Speaker placement dialed in as best as possible=>Quality/If you like your audio files=>Amp stability=>Inherent balance of speaker with directivity being a big strength coupled with actual full 20 to 20kHz reproduction. The rest are just near unimportant to the sound in any truly audible way.

Oh also there's no such thing as sounding like a live performance (that's an oxymoron)

I think it takes a special person with a EAR for what sounds good and what dosent. A fine truly dialed in system can take a long time to put together through trial and error. Years ago it was more about what store you walked into might have the biggest effect on what sounds you heard, now not so much. Its up to YOU as a dedicated HI-Fi individual to seek out the components that synergize the best. Its not an easy road, if done correctly. IMHO.

Matt M

Synergy is different for every listener, dependent on his ears/tastes....

When a guy says "My dealer did all the synergy for me", he failed to understand that the dealer’s synergy picks would not be the ideal synergy items for his ears/tastes.

A ’good’ dealer would just let the customer pair different things he carries, let the customer listen to such pairings and have him decide what appears to be synergistic or not. 

A ’not so good’ dealer’s usually trying to move stuff that never sells or trying to sell stuff that gets him the big margins... when he claims to do "synergy picks" for the unsuspecting customer.

@calvinj since you see this a lot, please give a few examples of thrown together systems.

Frankly, no. The dealers I've known actually take care in helping to match components. I think that's one of their most useful functions.