System building -budget $15,000


My friend and I are trying to put together a system with a budget of $15,000 as per request from another friends wife as a 50th birthday gift for her husband. The guy who will eventually own the sytem currently uses run of the mill components and is not really an audiophile. The wife is very keen that something nice should be put together which is simple to use even by her as she also likes to hear music from time to time.

The current list inclues following short listed items but not yet final. We are looking for some pointers in the right direction as far as matching the amp and speakers are concerned. The only other thing we will add is a CD player.

The list includes the choices as follows:

Speakers:

Porac D25 or D38
Kef Reference 203

Amplifiers

Jeff Rowland Conceto Integrated
Mark Levinson 383 Integrated

What do you guys think about the choices and what is a better match in terms of speaker and amp from the list above. Those who are familiar with either speakers or amps listed above should know better, so if you own either equipment please share your own experience about how you went about auditioning any of the above equipment and what sounded better to you in terms of matching.

Any input would be be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.
128x128quadophile

Showing 4 responses by quadophile

Thanks guys for the input.

Bundy: agreed auditioning is one way but the components selected make it difficult to go to one shop for auditioning.

Marco: The speakers selected for the reason that my friend is familiar with Proacs sound and thinks very highly of them, the Kef were my choice as I already own the Kef Reference Two. The person who will have this system may not be having a good or even decent system but sure appreciates music reproduced from high end system as they frequently pay visits to others friends homes and are most of the time exposed to good systems. My friend who is helping it put together has the Alon Adriana's being driven by Cary 2A3 amps, Wadia CD player and TNT turntable (to be upgraded to Graham's soon). Between the two of us we basically want to put together a simple but very reliable and flexible system. The integrated amp is chosed as both of them can be upgraded if needed in future. The system will definitely not be used for background listening. They may not be into high end now but sure enough they know what is high end when they listen to one. The room is fairly decent size where a floorstander can easily be accomodated so that too is not a concern, we have done the pre feasibility after which we arrived at the short listed components.

We will certainly not skimp on the front end, one player that we did consider was the Arcam 192 but that is yet to be decided.

As far as Musical preference goes, they listen to variety of music which includes but not limited to Jazz, Classical, Soft Rock, contemporary from the 60's and 70's.
Tim,

Thanks a lot, but the idea of buying a birthday gift means you buy brand new and not second hand, it would look foolish on anyones part giving a present which is second hand. :)
Tim,

No need to apologise, you were being helpful for sure. Please accept my apology if I offended you in any way, as I just realised going through my own post to you that it was not very politely put.

I respect your opinion and appreciate your taking time to come back and post that message with a nice explanation. I value everyones opinion here, if it does not work in this post it may serve its purpose otherwise. Your suggestion is duly noted.

Thanks again for your input.
Jeffjarvis,

Tubes for a newbie? I think that might be going overboard, we do not know if the guy will eventually become an audiophile, he is 50 already, the likelyhood of him seriously getting into hifi is very small. Anyway, what you suggested is, I am sure a great match and both highly regarded components.

We prefer solid states to bottles, don't forget bottles require additional warm up times to sound good.