High End and Classical Music

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.

I'm with Sean. I just got into audiodiction recently and once I stopped buying equipment every other day I started to listen and wanted that "hair on the back of the neck" feeling. I'm a Deadhead and bluegrass fan and I started to listen to Miles and 'Trane and now Copland and Holst. For me the journey started with the equipment and keeps getting better. I'll listen (and buy) anything that is well recorded, as classical seems to be. Problem is its tough to put American Beauty or the Seldom Scene on, I think I've been spoiled, or grown up.

Many of the audiophiles I know are like myself, they have a wide range of tastes. I truly love fine classical such as, Mozart, Dvorak, and my favorite, Banntok. However, I also invest time listening to Lionel Hampton, John Lee Hooker, la Vienta, Belafonte, Chet Atkins, and every piece of traditional music from other cultures I can lay my hands on. Time has taught me when you limit yourself to one or two types of music, you cut yourself off from the rest of the world. There is no greater shame.

Listen exclusively to classical; movies increasingly encroach on music's territory, however. (Gone With The Wind competes with Berlioz Requiem, etc.)