This discussion reminded me of the stereophiles of decades past. When I was a co-op and went from making minimum wage to $30K/yr I thought I was rolling in money. So I idiotically went to go buy a stereo that I had always wanted. I went to a store where you reserved a listening room. The room had those foam pointy things on the wall and an employee would set up whatever speaker/receiver/etc. components you wanted. You'd say, "let me hear the Vandersteens, and he would bring them in, hook them up for you, let you listen to your own music while he looks through the glass window in the door. I would wave him in and say "let me hear that on a Nakamichi amplifier", and he would hook that up for you. The thing is, I was in the front room. The room where speakers "only" cost $800 and amps "only" cost $600 (in 1995.. multiply by 1.56 for today's dollars). There were 4 rooms. The room in the back had speakers that cost $200K-$300K. Only the front 2 rooms bothered having CD players. Because the "sophisticated listener" would not dare soil his ears with digital music. The equipment in back would only have record players, huge vacuum tube amps for each channel, speaker cables that were braided and 1 inch in diameter, etc. Somebody could easily drop half a million on the ultimate system. And I gaurandamntee you, no human on earth could tell the difference between my Nakamichi/Vandersteen combination playing CDs and their gazillion dollar systems playing records (except you get pops when there is dust on the record).