What is a really good sounding low volume system??

First, congratulations and second, sorry you have to make these adjustments. I think you will have to have headphones. I have an apartment that I use frequently which is close to work and volume is restricted. Only headphones will give you the dynamics you need. And, you will keep the system for a long time no matter where you live. For temporary near field listening, I saygo cheap. Bookshelf monitors with wide dispersion and tube amplification. Buy used so you can sell it back and break even. Sennheiser HD 800s are fantastic but so are the 600s. Tube headphone amplifier from Woo or Schiit. Upgrade Cardas or Moon cable. Active powered speakers from Emotiva or Dynaudio with a tube preamplifier. Cables from mono price or Bluejeans. Good luck.

It was nice knowing you. Good luck with your marriage. I will do some research for you on power cords for your new Bose radio.

I use a PL2 with Ascend Acoustic Sierra Monitors. Sounds very good at low volumes. Rega RS1 are good speakers at low volumes, as well. You will get quality sound, just not all the audio niceties.

I am president of my coop with a spouse who can hear mice peeing on wool, so I do not play my music at anything more than low volumes, with the occasional foray to mid level volumes on a weekday afternoon when no one is at home.

Save your cash for a bigger place. Don't place your electronics on the common wall, that is common courtesy.

Rich

I'll use headphones and some cheap PC sound system. You can also get Samson active studio monitors specifically designed for the low-volume music. My headphone choice is Beyerdynamic T70 will have no compromise to HD800 for a fraction of price.

Unfortunately, the best sounding systems at low volume are horn systems that are also physically big in size so they create other placement problems. There are other somewhat bass restricted higher efficiency systems that also sound pretty good at lower volume.

Dipole speakers are also great for keeping sound levels down outside of the primary listening area. Such speakers, like quad electorstatics, tend to focus sound within the listening area they are aimed at, so that there is MUCH less sound spilling outside of the listening area (the out of phase front and back signal cancel at the sides, large panels tend to have less fall off of soundlevel with distance than speakers that are closer to being point sources).

I have owned large panel electrostatics (Martin Logan) so I can personally say that they are much better than conventional dynamics in reducing the amount of sound outside of the listening area.