Tidal Sunray vs Gryphon Trident

You should consider adding Avalon and TAD to your speaker search. I would prefer those to Wilson, Rockport, and Magico. I'd like to hear the Tidal sometime, but $180k is heck-of-a-lot for a speaker that does bass.

Incidentally, I am skeptical that a company can make every component outstanding. I think good audio companies have a niche. Maybe Tidal and Gryphon are the exceptions, but one should keep an open mind when putting a system together.

I would disagree that seating perspective is synonymous with detail. For me, close sound is not real sound. Sure, you see the trees, but you lose the forest. Music and detail are possible: you can have the forest and the trees. The whole is preserved, but you can also drill-down and appreciate the components.

Think of Solti conducting, always trying to maximize the excitement at a given moment. But he loses sense of the big picture and the music sounds episodic. Think of Furtwangler conducting. He sees the composition as a whole, and manages to balance excitement and darkness with overarching themes that reveal the genius of his approach and the composer. With Solti, maybe I can listen to a little bit, and his recordings are inconsequential. With Furtwangler, it only really makes sense if you listen start to finish. Again, forest and trees.

I'll let the conductor work and worry about all the little details. I'll sit back and enjoy the complex and layered harmonies, rhythms, and colors which emerge. Nothing is spotlit, everything is preserved. This is the sound I have been sculpting for the past 2 years.

No, no, no.

Not forest or trees. I'm talking forest AND trees. Like a real performance. I prefer the floor of the hall for an orchestral performance, which is more detailed and involving compared to the balcony. But the detail is a means to an end, and not an end in itself.

Recordings have a certain perspective in terms of space and position. They are all different. Altering that perspective is a coloration that accentuates certain frequencies to make some aspects seem more prominent. But when you accurately reproduce a recording, the detail is there but it resides more in the subconscious. The goal is to reproduce the recording in a natural way and not to alter the presentation. If you make it into something it is not, something else has to compromised.

When paying for premium audio components without compromise, expect . . . no compromise.

Murataltuev, I would also like to know your thoughts on the Kaiser. Looking at it, I'm not sure how it made your list. It isn't full-range, and rear-facing woofers are a challenge. Anyway, maybe something about it will click...