Last Audition - Blown Away By A Lottery System


I went into a local B&M store and did a quick listen to an integrated and speaker pair around 6K.  I was just chatting with the sales guy, and I said thanks and was going to walk through the rest of the listening rooms.  He volunteered to take me to another room that wasn't in use.

This room was sparsely populated with two systems, as opposed to the other room that had a dozen speakers and several dozen pieces of electronics.  He streamed a song that I heard on the other system.  Without knowing exact models of equipment:
Moon player
Moon pre
Moon mono blocks
Focal Utopia
cables & IC unknown

The sales guy is watching my expression, which is disbelief, and then starts quoting the prices which totaled $380K.
That is the most expensive stereo I've ever heard, and was floored at the amount and quality of the sound - a dream system for sure.  Kind of gives me an insight to what some of you discuss here, but couldn't relate myself.

I'm screwed!  My budget only allows $20k, and that's probably what the cables in that system cost.

I bought a lottery ticket on the way home.  LOL.
bgm1911
Of course, if your room persists to be a problem, you could always take it out of the equation and go with high-end headphones and a great tube headphone amp!

I’m using Focal Sopra 2 speakers with a Simaudio 700i Integrated Amp and CD player with Discovery Cables. It’s a great combination.  
If you'd like to be totally blown away within your budget, do what it takes to audition the Dutch & Dutch 8c.   It's a totally engineered package of loudspeaker, with built-in active crossover, amplification, DAC and DSP EQ.   Add a laptop as your digital source and you're done buying audio gear.  You don't even need speaker cables.  Just good CAT-5 network cables.

They will totally blow your mind.