I read that whole Marantz review and it looks magnificent, if not my thing – I don’t care about home theater and understood hardly any of the specs listed (which omit the amplifier specs altogether other than the power though I assume they’re excellent.) I’d love a Marantz amp: Toshiba, although the amp I bought is from the late ’70s, when Japanese hi-fi was among the best in the world, has never been a top-of-the-line manufacturer, while Marantz has never been anything but.

I love looking at the backs of hi-fi components. That’s quite the array of speaker outputs on the Marantz and it’s got to be hell with bare wire; my old speakers (and new power amp) had bare-wire clamps instead of binding posts so I put pins on one end of 16AWG bulk wires from Home Depot (I don’t believe in fancy cables) and bananas on the other, and the convenience is so worth the $20 on Amazon for a box of like 10 pairs of connectors each.

That Audyssey EQ sounds very useful. The evil bitch downstairs started pounding on the walls at 5am last week when I was playing Bruckner at quite a reasonable, even unenjoyably low, volume, and five IMO is a reasonable time to be awake so I blasted “Dancing Queen” on repeat in the living room and turned up my clock radio all the way in the bedroom for two hours. That’ll teach her. Fucking bitch. She’s unemployed but has had her apartment for the last 13 years on a housing voucher and spends all her time drinking with illegals behind the 7-11 so forgive me if I have limited sympathy. Next time she fucks with me it’s ten hours of the Barney song on repeat all night – it was used as a torture method in Iraq, and if it’s against international law it’s good enough for her – but I’ll need to get earplugs first.

5.1 is speakers.sub but what is the third number? Ceiling speakers?

My system evolved from tube-based in my 20s and 30s, built with headphones in mind, as I was living at home or with roommates, to solid-state brand names as the old gear died piece by piece and my system re-oriented around speakers (I only use headphones when I want to play loud). Antique Sound Lab is a hell of a company, though, if you’re willing to do a little maintenance (mostly tightening the screws in the pots and cleaning every few years). Eventually the left channel died, and I could have gotten it fixed, but 19 years is 19 years and it was the last vestige of my old system so I moved on. I plan to save for a single-ended triode tube amp but they’re like $1500 (ironically, as it’s about the simplest of all amplifier circuits, with discrete components, but I guess it’s worth what people will pay for it) so I settled for the $230 Toshiba as a stopgap – and as I said, I may stick with it as you can simulate any sonic signature with computers, and my PC is my primary audio source these days.

I listed the radio signal in the phono stage as a drawback of the Cambridge, but my turntable hasn’t left the closet since I last moved. My last cartridge was a Nagaoka MP-150, which is a fantastic cartridge, if expensive and short-lasting: I had to replace the stylus after about 500 hours as opposed to the typical 1000+ (I replace them when they get noticeable distortion – Grados will last forever if you let them, and if you can avoid the hum). I haven’t needed phono since I digitized my whole ~1000-album collection (including my ~100 classical box sets) over the course of ten years or so, after swearing off buying any more for my swollen collection, and digital can perfectly capture anything you record with it, including the vinyl sound. So my vinyl sits in the unopened moving boxes in my walk-in closet but I’m never getting rid of it until I die, when all thousand albums are going to a thrift shop. I’ve actually listened to my whole vinyl collection, accordingly – or at least sat through them all while playing and divided them into tracks.

My TV is nothing impressive – a 32” PC monitor that I play movies and TV shows from Plex on as well as illegally streamed cable from the Internet, but my movies and TV shows fit on a 5TB hard drive (about 4.25TB of files) plus about 10TB of pro wrestling tapes (I went ham on Soulseek and downloaded 20 years of WWF and WCW TV). You have a 20TB hard drive – you into computers? This is mine (my old hi-fi budget has largely been poured into my PC – gimme an upvote yo. It’s not one of the antiseptic demonstration-quality builds):

https://pcpartpicker.com/b/ZZzfrH