Most resolving, transparent amps.

I think a good analogy of the term transparency would be the difference between looking through a dirty window as opposed to one that is extremely clean. In audio, I believe transparency is when the music's natural acoustics, ambience/reverberations along with the original signal are mostly preserved when the sound reaches your speakers. This is usually accomplished through components that have a very short signal path with good engineering & quality parts. It was mentioned above that passives are very successful in being very transparent which I find to be true. It doesn't take an audio engineer to figure why this is so since a passive has very few internal parts. In keeping with solid state amps, I think ARCs 100.2, Bat VK200 are very transparent. But it should also be mentioned as it was that a recording should be of sufficient quality, containing enough information for transparency to be present in varying degrees as well.

Rodmann99999, thankyou for your response and thoughts. I think you and I agree that transparency is high on the list as a system requirement. Anyway I have not made alot of cables/interconnect changes lately so I'm going to check out your recommendation on the Kimber Selects line even though I know cabling can be system dependent.

Pubul57, I think your partly correct in regards to two type of systems. An accurate but high quality system will not be forgiven of poor recordings. On the other hand a system that colors the music may sound good regardless of the quality of the recording.

Muralman1, poorly recorded CDs are not difficult to find unless most of your CDs are fairly new.