Hi BigWill, I had the great pleasure of your hospitality, but I am a committed believer in quality on-the-cheap. I paid about $70 for my Mapleshade Clearview speaker cables - came with a problem, they were nice enough to upgrade me to a pair of Mapleshade Clearview Double Golden Helix Plus speaker wires. I love 'em. Someday, you'll come by my place and let me demo some cool stuff for you. There are some amps I like very much - I have a Yamaha M-80, and a Kenwood KA9100. Paid a total of a bit over $100 for the two of them and they are in mint condition. I am also proud of my big Onk - an Onkyo M504. I did go a bit crazy and paid $300 for that one. One of my favorite amplifier scores however is the Onkyo M282 a 120 watt x 2 amp with a very rich sound quality. They list for about $300 each, but you can grab them off ubid.com for under $100 every now and again.
I also love my Axiom and Michaura speakers - they outperform speakers which cost my friends many, many times the price of my Canadian beauties.
I think the idea here is quality at a price. Anyone can throw megabucks at the problem of sound reproduction and come away with a pretty nice system. The challenge is, putting together a system which sounds as good and costs WAY less.
My favorite great system on-the-cheap is my garage system - a mint Kenwood KA9100 solid state amp (cost me $20, the seller and I thought it was broken, turned out it was just the jumpers), a pair of Dahlquist DQM-905s ($50) and a ($10 garage sale item) JVC XL504 6 disc changer (sounds substantially better than a Cambridge D500SE I bought and then sold).
I picked up a 2 channel Kenwood THX amp rated at 200 wpc, thought I would love it - hated it. The KA9100 sounds better, so does the big Onk, I've had other amps whose sound I did not like. I bought them thinking I would. Placebo effect? It's all in the sounds boys and girls, not the price, and they don't all sound the same.
