seperates over integrated. Why?

thanks Rich. nice bit of clarity. Agreed about receivers. Just put a serviced, slightly upgraded Marantz 2245 into service. sounds great before its 2 day warm up even started, and does beg the question...

Hi Rich. funny you should say that! Having not played with tone controls for years myself i turned my bass down 2 notches last night. also turned mid and treble up a bit. Also found the Marantz takes 2 days to warm up! Matti, I also am about to mod a t-amp. One of the things that's really bugging me about all this is that things often only obviously better AB'ing them. For musical enjoyment perhaps timrhu isnt so wrong. I've just bought a Taylor 313CE guitar on Epay, and am bemoaning the lack of a good piano right now. No hi fi i've ever heard can differentiate between pianos,well, let alone a 6' and 5'6" Steinway. Play 'em and you know! A crappy upright is more musical than most high end gear. Decreasing returns for money spent and reviewers superlatives, and the way speakers alter sound makes me wonder at Avantgarde Duos and a reasonably priced SET integrated with a nice mc phono stage on board if one exists

I heard at a show a £30,000 cd player feeding a £X0,000 pre feeding a £30,000 power amp £12,000 pair of speakers with £x,ooo intereconnects. A bit of Ricci the violinist sounded amazing, certainly eual to my syastem, though no better i'd guess. so i asked him to play Hotel California on the Eagle's Hell Freezes Over cd, and it sounded absolutely awful. You could pay £300 for every thing and do as well. I AM NOT JOKING. On my system that track sounds great, and is beautifully produced, for those of you who havent yet heard it at its best. Heard it wonderfully through a car sterio last week as well (ok it was good alpine gear). So whats The Fuss!!! I am becoming increasingly despondent. My system is one of the few ive heard that can make a grand piano half way interesting. I am a pianist who can tell a 5' grand from a 6' one live, but know of no cd player that can get much past @it may be a grand piano@ if i'm honest. Also, that Jadis is getting awful writeups at audiocircle. I'd love to hear it for myself but refuse to pay £900 on ebay right now to find out! Damn! (probably my loss) I wonder if there's a follow my leader mentality in audio with lots of people. So Seperates vs Integrated - blind test and hava a laugh.In HI FI+ issue 34 they did blind ABing of speaker cable with 3 "experts" who write for them, and one of them put a £40 QED cable in a system over the mighty £2000 Vallhala cable. Also, to compound it, they then tried to give reasons for it and did a terrible job of making sense of the stats (I did maths at university by the way). I wish they'd used 24g ratshack copper nicely seperated for impedence as well just to really make fools of themselves. Are you getting my drift? Seperates vs integrated starts to become muddied water. And what about the room!!! My brain hurts. AAGHH

Thanks for your response Rarl, and it feels like a sane voice. i also agree with you Dgplo. Thanks, david