All-in-One units for retiring audiophile & music lovers in 2025, say what?

@decooney Hey thanks for the kind words. We have no local 'real' audio dealers unless you count best buy, sams and walmart. No real source of serious gear. Everything that steps up to serious gear is multiple hours away from me. And I just cannot make those kinds of road trips now. Too old too tired and too many other things to manage while the house is being rebuilt. ARGH. I would love to have a local B&M store to visit and ultimately support, but its totally off the table. I will only buy major ticket equipment from sources that offer a home trial with the ability to return if its unacceptable. That will surely limit my choices, but in my biosphere, traveling 3-4 hours to visit my audio dealer is unacceptable. I don't enjoy driving much anymore. At least not in traffic with distracted drivers more interested in their cellphones than actually driving their car. No thanks, I will stay at home where I am less likely to die in a preventable accident.

@asvjerry Hi Jerry, thanks for your insights. And yeah, revising the approach thruout the house is an ongoing project. I want good video capability in any room except the kitchen. For office space, I am considering a wall mounted TV that I can watch videos or live tv on in addition to a desktop monitor with good quality 2 channel audio. This becomes the practice room for the trombone and bass guitar as well and provides a decent ( I hope ) listening environment separate from the theater room. My wife often wants to watch things that I have no interest in seeing and having my own refuge in my office that gives decent sound and relatively immersive video would be a great solution to differing tastes in programming. So the office becomes listening room, practice room and substitute TV room. I can downgrade from 5 to 2.1 channels with minimal suffering in that space. I might change my mind later but for now, 2.1 seems adequate. That way I can close the door and work or play or relax and not worry about my wife doing her thing in the theater room. The kitchen will likely be powered from the main theater room system with its own amplifier. And possibly the garage too, though I am inclined to do bluetooth from my phone to a stand-alone system there. Still working on solutions that offer the most flexibility without breaking the bank. Part of all this depends on how the insurance company is to deal with. So far we have found them not to want to play nicely, so until we can get a sense of what their bottom line really is, all plans are in a serious state of flux.

What an interesting thread and all the thoughtful replies to the OP. I am starting to walk down the simplification path to some extent. At the age of 72 I still enjoy a system of separates but not to the order of magnitude I once did. This bears explaining. I was exposed to hi-fi gear back in the days when AR inc was making a name for itself and state of the art home audio gear was from heathkit and featured a williamson type tube amp (20 wpc) and a separate preamp. Add Tuner and turntable and you have a mono system. That was Dad's first system that I had recollection of and 'helped' build it at the age of 8, my help largely limited to asking way too many questions and getting in his way. But that kit building experience opened the door for a career in electronics, and many more kits from companies like Lafayette, Heathkit and Hafler. All of which helped me along my path. Fast forward to where I was in early 2024. At one point there I had no less than 11 different sound/video systems scattered throughout my house, almost all of that were separates, with various extra pieces that either had fallen out of favor due to age or some personality trait I decided was sufficient reason to disconnect and store as a spare. Then in April the house fire happened and that was the end of essentially all of what I had. Its safe to say I won't be rebuilding 11 separates based systems when I move back into the house. Its just not going to happen. Most of what will be bought will be simplified systems that don't have a high fiddle factor. I too many other things I would rather do than try to collect the odd collection of stuff I had before. Its just not worth the trouble at this point. I will certainly have for sure one separates system but for the most part, integration and consolidation is the path forward. For sure there will not be 11 systems either...that ship has sailed. I am leaning more towards the idea of things that are mostly music based systems and 2 channel to have a DAC/preamp/amp combo with perhaps a streamer or computer as the source. The system I am using now is an Emotiva TA1 with a Macbook Air as the source, connected by USB. Not high powered at all, but sufficient as a desktop system. So, am I considering systems more consolidated than this one. Perhaps for the garage or bedroom or kitchen, these locations truly beg for a simple quality solution. Not necessarily cheap but something that is simple to use and sounds good at reasonable levels. It seems there is a TON of gear out there now that meets these parameters and is fairly affordable. The lure of the simplicity combined with near audiophile or true audiophile quality is pretty compelling. Choosing out of this glut of gear is a daunting process, and so time consuming due to the lack of brick and mortar stores within a reasonable distance from my home. But I still want at least one serious separates system that will rock the house like a Grateful Dead concert. I cling to the belief that in order to make the illusion of actually being at the venue where the recording was done really come home, you need to be able to reproduce the live levels and dynamic range that were captured on the recording. To ensure that is possible you need efficient speakers and prodigious amounts of amplifier power. Everyone draws that line in a different place but for me, especially given this multichannel system must reproduce movies and music convincingly, if the amp and speaker combo can produce clean musical peaks at 115db that is a reasonable compromise between true real world loud levels you would experience hearing gun shots or jet engines spooling up or....pick your loud sound effect. For music, that is certainly enough and for sound effects it exceeds Dolby standards by 10 db so I'll call it good. That said, I dont know of an integrated amp/streamer that has that potent an amplifier section. This is easily achievable with separates. So begins the slow process of managing and rethinking my expectations going forward.

What an interesting thread and all the thoughtful replies to the OP. I am starting to walk down the simplification path to some extent. At the age of 72 I still enjoy a system of separates but not to the order of magnitude I once did. This bears explaining. I was exposed to hi-fi gear back in the days when AR inc was making a name for itself and state of the art home audio gear was from heathkit and featured a williamson type tube amp (20 wpc) and a separate preamp. Add Tuner and turntable and you have a mono system. That was Dad's first system that I had recollection of and 'helped' build it at the age of 8, my help largely limited to asking way too many questions and getting in his way. But that kit building experience opened the door for a career in electronics, and many more kits from companies like Lafayette, Heathkit and Hafler. All of which helped me along my path. Fast forward to where I was in early 2024. At one point there I had no less than 11 different sound/video systems scattered throughout my house, almost all of that were separates, with various extra pieces that either had fallen out of favor due to age or some personality trait I decided was sufficient reason to disconnect and store as a spare. Then in April the house fire happened and that was the end of essentially all of what I had. Its safe to say I won't be rebuilding 11 separates based systems when I move back into the house. Its just not going to happen. Most of what will be bought will be simplified systems that don't have a high fiddle factor. I too many other things I would rather do than try to collect the odd collection of stuff I had before. Its just not worth the trouble at this point. I will certainly have for sure one separates system but for the most part, integration and consolidation is the path forward. For sure there will not be 11 systems either...that ship has sailed. I am leaning more towards the idea of things that are mostly music based systems and 2 channel to have a DAC/preamp/amp combo with perhaps a streamer or computer as the source. The system I am using now is an Emotiva TA1 with a Macbook Air as the source, connected by USB. Not high powered at all, but sufficient as a desktop system. So, am I considering systems more consolidated than this one. Perhaps for the garage or bedroom or kitchen, these locations truly beg for a simple quality solution. Not necessarily cheap but something that is simple to use and sounds good at reasonable levels. It seems there is a TON of gear out there now that meets these parameters and is fairly affordable. The lure of the simplicity combined with near audiophile or true audiophile quality is pretty compelling. Choosing out of this glut of gear is a daunting process, and so time consuming due to the lack of brick and mortar stores within a reasonable distance from my home. But I still want at least one serious separates system that will rock the house like a Grateful Dead concert. I cling to the belief that in order to make the illusion of actually being at the venue where the recording was done really come home, you need to be able to reproduce the live levels and dynamic range that were captured on the recording. To ensure that is possible you need efficient speakers and prodigious amounts of amplifier power. Everyone draws that line in a different place but for me, especially given this multichannel system must reproduce movies and music convincingly, if the amp and speaker combo can produce clean musical peaks at 115db that is a reasonable compromise between true real world loud levels you would experience hearing gun shots or jet engines spooling up or....pick your loud sound effect. For music, that is certainly enough and for sound effects it exceeds Dolby standards by 10 db so I'll call it good. That said, I dont know of an integrated amp/streamer that has that potent an amplifier section. This is easily achievable with separates. So begins the slow process of managing and rethinking my expectations going forward.

@asvjerry Yeah it was a fire followed by Fire Department induced flooding, All the flooding did was save items in good enough shape to identify what they were. Of course, not all things were identifiable since the garage burnt to the ground and left nothing but rubble. The fire was plenty hot enough to melt aluminum, fueled by chemicals and gas and propane and lets not forget the oxygen and acetylene bottles....yeah it was pretty intense. Lost two motorcycles and a ton of tools and equipment related to racing, plus one car burned...my insurance is now nearly unaffordable. So to say we are pretty unhappy with the situation is a fair understatement, and the lack of cooperation from ins. co. is off the charts. No joy or fairness there at all. Cannot say everything I would like to since it is an open unpaid claim so far.

@decooney Yeah I have the time to do the research and make decisions based on reasonable educated guesses now. Its going to be a lengthy process and in some ways I am dreading the length of time it will take to get things processed thru to a point I can sit back and enjoy them again. I'm a long ways away from that at this point. I'm guessing I will still be in process a year from now but that is just a guess. You have what I had but the list of whats left in the aftermath of the fire is heavily truncated. Very little was saveable. I was in an enviable position of really liking what I had and so much so, I wasn't looking to upgrade anything except maybe the TV in the theater room. Other than that I was fairly happy with what I had and how it worked. Thanks for your interest and comments. Much appreciated.