$100K system build - % breakdown of spend

@holmz

1. How do we identify quality?
2. What is synergy?”

I recommend you start by reading Robert Haley’s Complete Guide to High End Audio. That should help you appreciate the nuances and complexity of high end audio. Also, a subscription to Stereophile and The Absolute Sound should help you understand what quality is and it’s relationship to sound characteristics and quality.  Synergy is also covered in these texts. I would recommend you listen to many components in a system… swapping only one ovation ally. This will help reveal what synergy in audio is.

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Thanks @ghdprentice  I have mostly been looking at the “Audio Perfectionist journal”.

Thanks @petaluman and all others. Fair point about the room. The room now (and in the future) is not a TV room. I think windows will be the main obstacle. Similar to my room now, I’m probably destined for a main floor room, mostly dedicated to hifi, with some plants, shelves, more seating than just the sweet spot, etc. I’ll have to think about windows/treaments some, I think. Received a copy of Jim Smith’s Get Better Sound over the holidays - haven’t started yet but perhaps I’ll get some ideas from there. 
 

I also appreciate the comment re: power conditioning. 

@ghdprentice 

"I recommend you start by reading Robert Haley’s Complete Guide to High End Audio."

Is that available on audiobook?  :-)

@carlsbad

Is that available on audiobook? :-)

As a third person reviewer, please let me know how it goes for you Sir.

I always view synergy as something more like a synergy of flaws…

(where ideally all pre amps would have a standard low output impedance and all amps a stanrd high input impedance, and just be “wires with gain”.
And the interconnects be electrically ideal with zero capacitance, inductance and resistance.)

And then those flaws are more like getting vinegar into the food, so we spice it up some sugar and pineapple to make a sweet and sour sauce… rather than a Carolina BBQ sauce… or some other appealing flavour.

Or we have lack of synergy where the flaws are all the same direction in vector space.

Ideally we choose equipment where the error vectors are close to being zero magnitude, and then we do not care which direction they point as they sum close to zero, because individually they are all close to zero.

The other synergy example might be having a bright SS amp with a bunch of high freq harmonics. So we use a tube amp with high low low order harmonics to hide the high frequency harmonics.
This is analogous to using an air freshener to hide the smell of farts.

In the context of starting with a $100k budget, one would hope that there would be no obvious “stinkers” in the resultant stack of gear that was acquired.