My wife and I listen to classical of all periods, Heavy Metal, Middle Eastern (My wife also belly dances)and Art Techno. I agree with the general drift of the comments above. You're lucky if your favorite music is Baroque and early music since it is less costly to approach realism with an audiophile system. I listen to a lot of early music but my wife and my greatest love is late romantic music(which is psychologically fairly close to a fair amount of Metal). We've been to over 1000 professional performances and trying to reproduce the Mahler 8th,Turandot or Bruckner in your living room when you know what it sounds like live is a VERY expensive proposition. But a system that can is also jaw dropping on Metallica, Judas Priest etc. My one suggestion if you like your system is to spend some money on room treatment. Some ASC tube traps will really bring out the nuances of Baroque intonation that are probably being obscured by your listening room interactions.
High End and Classical Music
Being quite new in the world of high-end, I would like to ask the following question: how many Audiogon Forum members are listening exclusively or almost exclusively to classical music? My impression is that regrettably rather few "high-enders" are interested in classical music. On the other hand, having a lot of friends - professional musicians - I also know that among them there are hardly any high end owners. I am one of them myself. Recently bought the following components: Mark Levinson 383 & 39, ProAc 3.8, cables Van den Hul The Revelation and MC Gold Hybrid. Although I am completely satisfied with this system (sounds tremendously!), I realised too late, that for the kind of music I am listening al the time (especially early music and baroque), there are maybe better combinations. So the question is: are some components more suitable than others for a particular kind of music? Thanks in advance for any reactions.