High End and Classical Music

I grew up listening to what is now referred to as "classic rock" courtesy of my Father and ended up getting into Punk during the first wave in 77. This turned into hardcore and then metal with all of its variations, etc... Getting back into "hi-end" audio has DRASTICALLY opened up my musical horizons and i'm quite glad of it. I am now a supporting member of a local classical station that sounds AMAZINGLY good for radio broadcasts and have purchased appr. 200 classical CD's and albums within the last year or so. While the purchase of a few blues based discs and quite a few female vocalists have been worked in, i have yet to find any modern jazz that strikes my fancy. One thing that i have noticed is that many of the "hi-fi" type recordings that are not classical based do sound good in terms of quality, but completely lack "soul" or "feeling" to the music. It's as if they are "sterile" by nature. On the other hand, classical only gets better and better with better recordings. Anyone else notice this too ? Sean >

To give you also my 5 cents worth: Mes and Rcprince have said it all. Enjoy!

Thanks a lot for all reactions! Very valuable!

Xyzdim - I'm in your flock. Depending on the time and mood, I enjoy Ben Webster or Albert Collins, but generally I listen to rock / pop in all it's sub-genres. There's been a lot of articles lately about "guilty pleasures" - music that you know you "shouldn't enjoy" but do. At nine o'clock at night after a 12 hour workday, I find that I enjoy a lot of this guilty pleasure music and, to boot, don't feel particularly guilty about it :-)

Koen, to get back to your original question, starting this thread, I would say that for chamber music Quad Electrostats with either first class tubed electronics and top of the line XLO or Purist wires would be your best bet. Jadis comes to mind, or Aethetix, as far as electronics are concerned. If you can find the Jadis 80 monoblocks somewhere on the used market, those combined with the Quads will take you to heaven! You could add a Gradient subwoofer, if you want to enjoy a rich, full cello rendering. What I've also heard and liked with the Quads were the Spectral electronics, together with the MIT wires. The Bartok string quartets, which are full of dynamic nuances, seemed to me rendered best through this combination, but if besides sparkle, you love your strings to bloom and spread, stick with the above mentioned tube stuff.... voices, through the Jadis (or the Aesthetix) have a wonderful threedimenionality, which so far I have not heard elsewhere.
If you want bigger sound, more dynamics from pppp to ffff and you own a couple of oilwells, your choice could be a Jadis four chassis front end, their 200/500 or 800 amps and a pair of the big Soundlabs or the Pipedreams or even better, one of the bigger horn loaded speakers from A-Capella. With the Soundlabs you might have to think of a pair of SS-big babies driven subwoofers, with the other two you will not. I would combine the a-capellas with Lamm gear and enjoy the illusion of being transported to the Chicago Symphony or to Carnegie with spl close to the real thing. Imperative to achieve this, to my ears at least, with big orchetral renderings of classical music is a top notch vinyl front end. So you'll need some more oilwells.