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Recommendations for HiFi Listening Room

Newbie here.  Wife and I are looking to turn our Great Room into a listening room.  It’s roughly 21’X’19 and has a cathedral ceiling that is 11’ tall at the wall and 20’ tall at the apex.  Spoke to a good hifi dealer in the area who made the following recommendations/proposal and I’m curious if this group may have any input for getting maximum bang for my buck.  Basically, with a budget around 35k (or thereabouts) would you buy something similar or are there any components you’d add or swap out?

Paradigm Persona 3F

McIntosh MA8950

Pro-Ject Xtension 9 w/ Ortofon Black Cartridge 

Sony ES DSD Music Server (this one concerns me a touch in that it appears to be an 8 yr old product line).

Thanks so much in advance for your collective expertise.  My wife isn’t going to let me drop money into this for another 15 years so I need to get it right the first time. 

If it matters, our musical taste is quite varied: classical, jazz, classic rock, alternative, hip hop.  My mother complained in my youth that if i had 10 bucks I would just buy a CD with it.  She is still right. 

brewerslaw

Showing 2 responses by sbank

sbank's avatar
sbank
3,382 posts
 

@brewerslaw Just because you bought tons from iTunes doesn't mean you're stuck with Apple Music forever. When you stream it, they don't even play the best version of the files. They shrink to save bandwidth. Your best bet is to store you Apple purchased files in AIFF on a NAS or USB drive. Then you can play those with any decent software on a streamer even if you don't have a service subscription to Qobuz etc. Roon would make for better metadata. One super annoying thing about Apple is they don't by default place album art .jpgs in your folders. You can easily fix this some cheap or maybe even free software. But that's a whole 'nuther conversation. 

@grislybutter buying an amp before choosing what speakers you'll use them with is like buying your favorite tires because they'll be the "spirit of your ride" then looking at what vehicles fit those tires. Speakers vary far more widely in design and each needs an appropriate amp. The delta between appropriate amps will be significant, but nowhere near as wide ranging in possibilities vs. the myriads of speaker options. You wouldn't want to buy monster truck tires and then decide you'd like to drive a Miata. Cheers,

Spencer   

sbank's avatar
sbank
3,382 posts
 

@grislybutter Totally agree with you about pros/cons of either approach and no demo is going to be worthwhile w/o appropriately matched amp & speakers. However, my analogy was to try to help point the less experienced OP down a path of more likely success. Of course, it's just an opinion.
As an example, I'd encourage any newbie looking to make a sizable investment to try to demo planars, horns and a number of dynamic speakers. If they fall in love with one type, then learn what amps might be good fits. Most newbies IMHO would be less inclined to fall in love with one type of amp topology definitely and then consider all the speakers that might fit. 
Room size and environmental factors are an important criteria in the big picture and matching the speaker size to the room size seems far more intuitive to me. YMMV. Cheers,

Spencer

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