Over the last twenty years of my fifty year audiophile career I have gone out of my way to listen to live acoustic music… a single piano, small unamplified jazz ensemble, and I have had season tickets to a great symphony orchestra in a good acoustic space for over ten years. This experience has redirected the direction of my purchase and profoundly changed the character of my system.
It used to be one music type would benefit from my system improvements… now all do with each upgrade. Unless you listen only to, say, Rock… then buy JBL… and the kind of electronics used in mastering. Otherwise, correctly correlating your system to reproduce real acoustic music is what you want to do… as it will generally improve rock, and other all amplified stuff.
I can’t begin to tell you how rewarding this has been. My system went from overly detail forward ( same amount of detail, only not stuck in your face) to incredibly musical. It changed the emphasis to the music from putting the mastering techniques and microphones used in your face. I now listen to music about three hours a day now and have to be torn away from it. As opposed to one hour.
You can see my system under my userID. True high end companies like Audio Research and Sonus Fabre have dedicated themselves to reproduce music… naturally and wholisticly as opposed to just adding forward detail and slam just to sound impressive. They have taken music reproduction to truly amazing levels.