This is very general, so help us to help you by giving some further details on your room and current system. In order to really help you without just shouting out names of equipment, which everyone seems to do, please provide as much detail as possible. I’ve been in this hobby nearly 40 years, and I used to sell audio gear years ago, and if someone came into the store with such a broad want list as this, I’d have to chunk down on likes, dislikes, etc. So answering the below questions will go a long way to really helping you and giving you the proper advice.
1. What components do you have now?
2. What do you like and dislike about your current system?
3. You say your budget is under $25K, how much under?
4. Describe your listening room? What are the dimensions? Is it furnished? Hardwood floors, wall to wall carpeting?
5. Is your listening room solely used for listening or is it a great room that is used for multi functions?
6. Putting together a system is all about system synergy, and how each component will react with each other and in your listening room. Everything matters and many people are of the school that the most important component of your system is your listening room.
7. You have a large CD collection and you want to stream music. Are there any other sources that you’ll be using like a turntable, tuner, cassette deck or reel to reel?
8. Is the Wife Acceptance Factor important?
9. Is video going to be tied into this system or is it strictly for 2 channel audio? Video presents a whole other set of challenges and complexities.
10. Is this large room part of an existing house or is this new construction. Is there the ability to run dedicated lines to this listening room? As this will take up part of your overall budget too.
11. How soon are you looking to put all of this together?
Once we know the answers to the above, then we can start to allocate monies in your budget to your listening room and individual components.
There are a couple schools of thought on this. The Ivor Tannenbaum / Linn approach is to have the best sources possible because the end result will only be as good as how it is reproduced. That makes sense.
I have also heard an incredible sound system with super high end tube amplification and speakers and completely mid Fi/low end sources and it sounded amazing!
Well, that’s about as far as I can go right now on this. You want to do this once and you want to do it right the first time. Take the time to get really detailed about this. There’s a lot of questions that I brought up here, but this is a good starting point.
Be patient. Enjoy the journey and the process.
Lou