Recommendations for £10K+ setup?

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Aug 10, 2019
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The time has come to purchase a HT system, with no starting point to speak of in terms of existing equipment, other than a Sky+ HD box and Wii.

I've pretty much settled on the Pioneer LX508, but haven't a clue as to the rest of the setup. The room in entirety is 20' x 20', but the seating/tv area is just over half of that if that makes sense (imagine say a 12'x20' TV room with the TV centered on the 12' side and a 8'x20' office room placed next to it with no dividing wall).

Live in a seemingly well sound insulated apartment block but not looking to make enemies of my neighbours by cranking this thing up super loud very often. After a 5.1 setup primarily for watching TV/movies, quality music performance is desirable but secondary. No multi-room requirement.

Not majorly decided on budget (dangerous I know) - its a case of "will I really notice enough difference if I spent x more at normal listening volumes". If can spend less than £10K and be happy then great - if an extra few thousand would make a significant improvement then I would rather do so now rather than later.

Anyone out there got any suggestions? I live on the East side of London, really struggling to find dealers who have demo facilities who within a few hours could help me nail down some choices. Obviously the main items are:

- some sort of AV amp/processing (combined or separates),

- choice of 5.1 speakers (prefer meaty floorstanders over the "style" kind)

- DVD/CD player (not interested in Blue-Ray/HD-DVD as yet)

- added bonus would be being able to play networked uncompressed CD media to save the changing effort, but not critical at this point.

Suggestions very much appreciated,
Grant.
 
You must be nuts spending up to £10K besides which anyone doing so, should already know most of,if not all, the answers to their own questions anyway.

Suggest if you've got £10K to blow away on metal, wires, and glass, then hire out your local Sevenoaks Hi Fi shop for a weekend and let them guide you through this maze instead as my recommendations are bound to save you at least £7K
 
It sounds alot, but for a high end system your looking at 3000+ for a screen, 1000+ for an amp, 2000+ for speakers plus HD/Blu Ray player, racks, cables, CD, Radio, remote. I could easily spend 10,000.
 
Spot on FoxJA, couldn't have said it better myself.

Up until when I left NZ for the UK eight years ago I had what was a relatively high-end setup at the time back in NZ, but sold most of it before coming over here. I had separate 2-ch/3-ch amps, DD/DTS preprocessor, laser-disc etc etc. Back then I was happily geeky about this stuff but 8 years of enforced deprivation have left me a bit "out of touch" in my knowledge of recent technologies, recommended brands or indeed know any dealers/retailers here in the UK.

Having worked very hard all my life I can afford to spend a little more on something that in the past I took a great deal of pleasure out of and intend to again, so where is the harm in that? Right now I am in a position of starting with a clean slate - which means realistically I'm expecting it's going to cost in that order of money to get completely setup. I bet many people here have spent close to that going through generations of equipment during that time period alone - TV upgrades, amp /speaker upgrades etc. I've waited eight years to get myself setup again, if I choose well I shouldn't need to replace any of the components I buy for at least the next five years so that is only £2K per year of usage. If I use it 20 hours per week, that is £2/hr of use. And that's all assuming I throw it away after five years which realistically would not be the case. The numbers stack up for me...

I figured there must be a number of people on here who either already own or dream of upgrading to a high-end setup and have their "if only I could buy this" wish-lists to help me out. I am relatively "cash-rich but time-poor" - hoping that advice of others could shortcut evaluating every system on the market to a select few options...

Regards,
Grant.
 

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