Hi-fi & music lover in Ireland

It still surprises me how many technically-literate music lovers don’t own a decent music-playing system. I use Sonos for talk radio - this has been rewarding if occasionally frustrating - but to my ears it just ain’t hi-fi! For music, I have 2 systems: Livingroom - Primare A30.1 amp, Cyrus CD6SEII CD player, ProAc Studio 125 speakers. Study - Micromega IA100 amp (the old, much-loved MF B200 amp had worn out), MF E60 CD player (standing in for the Cyrus which moved to the main system when my Primare D30.2 sat down, apparently un-repairable due to non-availability of a replacement cd drive) and veteran MF MC-4 speakers. The Cyrus CD player has been pretty problematic: its transport is very unreliable and I’ll never buy anything from this company again because these issues have been going on for years and they’ve not owned up to or fixed them. Still, it sounds good... but, to be honest, I regret giving my original Arcam Alpha CD player to a friend in a fit of generosity. He’s still enjoying it! Neither system sounds as good as my original LP12, Arcam CD, MF B200 and MC-4s. That wasn’t perfect but it was sweet, had lovely imaging and didn’t harden at all when played loud. This last characteristic is something I love in a good system! With deteriorating hearing, I find some music systems hurt my ears nowadays - but still I always respond to high-quality sound... so I will buy again when I can afford it. I can’t afford to archive my thousands of cds so I play them instead. I would like to get a streamer and a storage device but this is all costly and I don’t know when (or if) it’ll finally become easier to do. I listen to lots - classical, jazz, folk/trad, world, singer/songwriters. I think hi-fi is a mystery area: there are great things out there but, curiously (and thankfully), they all sound different! So much for the perfect system! A lot of systems these days sound scarcely better to me - bar issues of scale and stereo separation - than my parents’ 1957 Telefunken radio... but I have heard lovely new systems and often they don’t seem to cost the earth. There is hope, isn’t there?