Am I having an affair with my SET monos, or are life-long relationships possible?


Ok, this is one for the "Deep Thoughts" files...and I am asking a much more cerebral (and emotional) question than one focused on specific equipment.  Get a good strong coffee (or wine or scotch), put on some of your favorite genre's best material, and close your eyes to ponder this one please.  For those interested, I'd love your thoughts and experience...

In very short summary, I'm very curious if, as a hetero male (any male?  any person?), there is some innate chemical makeup in us that will never let us be truly satisfied with our systems, no matter how good they are?  Will we fall in love with something we find and hear, only to have that feeling of emotional euphoria dull and fade over time (maybe it's years?), pulling us back to the point of wanting "more" or "better" regardless of what we've already found?  Is the constant pull of "new," "better," "more" something that will always eat as us, no matter how long and far we go in this "sport"?  Even if we find what we think is emotionally the "end game," will that disappear for us down the road and we'll slip back into the trap?

I was moved to the point of all-day emotion by a system I heard a few weeks back.  I drove home several hours in what honestly was a dangerous state of distracted driving because I was so moved by what I heard.  There was a 30 second period where I laughed myself to the point of tears because I couldn't even remember what state I was in...seriously.  Weeks later, I'm still thinking about it how that system made me feel.  I've spent every waking free moment I could find putting plans together for how/when/where I could put this system in my life.  In parallel I got my first pair of really nice SET monos, which I have been burning tons of midnight oil listening to whenever I have had the chance...I felt I needed to give great SET a try before I went full-into a different technological direction (the tech is not important to this thread, so I'm purposefully not mentioning any of the pieces or brands).  The SET amps in my current system are providing me glimpses of the emotional pull the music was giving me that day in "THE SYSTEM," but I'm still a long way off from what I heard and felt that day.

I hope this question resonates with some of you...and I hope each of you gets to feel that much emotion from some system somewhere sometime, if you haven't already.  They are out there.  I had read about them, many times, and believed they existed (I wanted to believe they did?), and now I truly believe it.  Perhaps you already own such a system...I truly hope so for your sake and the sake of your friends who get to listen with you.  And if so, do you think your love is life-long, or do you think it will fade over time and you'll be back in the sick game with the rest of us?  
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Like all things in life, we need to sometimes be reminded as to how great we have it.  The guy eating dry aged porterhouse and drinking French Bordeaux all day, will eventually get sick of it and and crave take out Chinese food.

Do we have to resort to Prudence working on the corner to realize how amazing our significant other is? No...  But 30 minutes or so of listening to music on a sound bar, and you'll go back to your system with the teenage puppy love and admiration when you first put her together.
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"I was moved to the point of all-day emotion by a system I heard a few weeks back".

C'mon man, ya gotta tell us more about this system!

Everything I loved, turned eventually to an affair, so having just an affair is far more rational than falling in love.


Agree with the 'SET mono' statement. With a truly great pair ...music doesn't get much better..and you really can get emotionally lost in the music.Good for you for finding the place...
Ok, I'll spill the beans...Classic Audio Loudspeakers' Hartsfield reproductions with John's own field coil drivers, fed by his personal Atma-Sphere MP-1 pre-amp and Atma-Sphere Novacron amps.  I don't know what table and cart he has.

The Hartsfields blew my mind.  I think the first speakers he played for me were his T-3.4s, which were also phenomenal, but the Hartsfields had such a massive scale, musicality and presentation that I can't stop thinking about them.  He tells me they are not optimally set up in his listening room, placed in the corners (they are really too big to move around regularly), so it's hard for me to imagine how they will sound optimally positioned.  I need a room big enough to appreciate their scale, and I will find the money for them.

I heard a pair of $70k speakers today being driven by ~$50k worth of very high-end and well-reviewed tube equipment from a European manufacturer...it was the same equipment that won best-in-show from a number of reviewers at a recent national show, and while it sounded great, it wasn't close to the Hartsfields.  Great, but not close.
... and there will be more and more different stuff with bunch of great reviews to turn your love into just an affair.