"There seems to be a consensus here regarding integrated. Perhaps I had mistakenly assumed that a separate amp and pre would be preferable.
What at was the line of thinking here? Cost prohibitive given budget?"
It's never that simple. People give different answers for completely different reasons. Unless you know the person who is giving you a recommendation, you really don't know why. Most of the time a recommendation is given by someone based on their own personal experience. "I like it, therefore you will too.", is the logic behind it. Its usually an honest approach, but it may not be worth much due to lack of experience with other types of gear, or just tastes that don't match up with yours. Another person may have some type of ax to grind. You see this a lot with cables. People that have strong views against cables in some way either got burned, made some poor choices, has it in their head that cables can't make a difference, the review said xyz, and any other number of negative reasons. The problem with this type of person is that their view may, or may not be realistic. Since were talking about cables, its probably a good time to deal with the term Snake Oil. Its a relative term that's used most of the time to classify cables. If someone tries a cable, or any other audio product, and it doesn't live up to expectations, they label it snake oil. At first that seems reasonable and they may be right, but the real question you need to ask is, "is that person qualified to label something snake oil?". That's a real problem, because if doesn't know what they are doing, it may not be fair to call it snake oil. Give the same exact product to someone else and they may get great results with it. Is it fair to label it snake oil fair? Anyway, since you're looking for advice, here's my take on cables. There's no question whatsoever that cables sound different and can make a difference. That said, its not a beginners task to start picking through different speaker cables and IC's. Your listening skills build over time and you shouldn't buy expensive cables without having the skills to verify their worth. You can walk into any Best Buy and get some entry level AudioQuest cables that don't cost a lot of money, but work very well. You get cables like that to start with. If you buy expensive cables because a review, or anyone else just told you to, that's foolish. If they don't make a difference, you've got no one but yourself to blame.
If you'll notice up to this point, I haven't made any specific recommendations on equipment. The reason for that is I don't have any idea as to what you like, or don't like. You can have 2 very good components sound very different from each other. In a situation like that, it comes down to personal preference. I don't know you well enough to make any specific recommendations except for 1. You brought up Vandersteen 1's, and I talked a little about them in my last post. That's a good speaker to start with. The reason is that Vandersteen makes very transparent speakers. What I mean by that is they impose very little sound of their own on the music. A transparent speaker makes it very easy to hear what the other components in the system are contributing to the overall sound. That's why its such a safe pick. If you don't like the sound of your system, you'll almost never have to get rid of the speakers. You just change the offending component(s). The Model 1's are also very easy to drive and they're time and phase correct.
