Thanks everyone for your recommendations. I shall write them all down, and give them all serious consideration, regardless of price. I'd also like to give my thoughts on the Silver 1. My experience is far less informed than you seasoned listeners, since I can only compare them to the knackered Mission 701 pair which they replaced. The jump in resolution was huge, of course, serving mainly to reveal the crudity of a cheap cd player and old amp combo. The tweeters are indeed very open and direct. My music now sounds slightly scratchy and shrill. I see this as a positive thing, since it tells me that there is so much to gain in a higher quality signal. The missions clearly benefit from their huge, front-ported enclosures, so the bass from the much smaller Silvers was actually less pronounced, but obviously more extended. Good stuff. Also, vocals project in a much more breathy, defined space. The cost of this clarity, is that I can hear the ragged edges of of everything-I suspect this can be attributed to the sub-par DAC of the cd5004. Out of interest, I hooked up a1991 Philips cd624 which I had kicking around. This old relic sounded predictably crude, yet it's way with vocals through the Silvers, easily trumped the cd5004. It made me realise that I may need smoother, more refined electronics in order to get great vocals out of the Silvers.