I was wondering if you guys would offer some opinions. I'm mulling some speaker upgrades as you know and this is what I'm thinking.

Ultimately, I want to get the Avantgarde Duos on Audiogon, which run about $7500-$9000. It would take me quite some time to save my pennies to be able to afford them. I figure about a year and a half.

Here's what I'm thinking as the interim solution.

a) Do nothing, enjoy what I have and save the money to get the Avantgardes

b) Get NHT 3.3 as an interim solution. They're better than what I currently have and worth the $1500

To make a long story short I decided 2 weeks ago to enter the world of high end audio. This all sprung from a desire to dust of the old vinyl. I haven't even bought my first turntable yet and today I found an old Altec "voice of the theater" cabinet...It's nice. speaker system is model 820a. Cabinet is 821a. My question: What do I do with this thing? Right now I'm playing mono mixed CD's like the Beach Boys and old Phil Spector stuff. I know I will never find and could not afford another one of these. How do I listen to stereo recordings on it?

If you want to avoid that "dorm" look storing 1,000+ CDs can be difficult. Does anyone store their collection--or a majority of it--inside CD albums? That eliminates the space hungry jewel case. I know albums consume less space, but are they practical? Please comment.

I currently have a Technics SL-D2 direct drive turntable with a Ortofon cartridge I paid about $69 for at The Neddle Doctor I forget the model, connected to my Denon AVR-1906 receiver through an old Marantz integrated I'm using as a phono stage. My speakers are B&W DM220s. It is a humble set up but it serves me well. The Marantz is being moved to another room for other duties and I am planing on investing about $500 into my playback system.

I very rarely tend to browse my music library in iTunes, (which I use on Windows XP for ripping/tagging CDs), since I mostly browse/play back with either foobar2000 (headphone system) or Sonos (big-rig). However while fixing the tags on a disc I had ripped the other day I noticed something very strange.

Lots of tracks had a little '!' icon in the left-hand column of the library view and if I tried to play them I got the message 'The song XYZ could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?'

Telarc does blind A/B to checkout some new stuff, why is it not used at StereoPhile? Bet it would show just how goofy some claims are. Wood blocks, overpriced TT's, giant changes due to a piece of wire. DBT, it works on drugs, recording pros, why not at teh magazine? http://www.digitalaudio.dk/Press_telarc.htm

http://www.digitalaudio.dk/

http://www.merging.com/

Briefly scanning over Amazon.com's offerings I noticed that the last reissue of this album was remastered in 1994, is this correct? Any newer reissues with better sound, or in a better format (sacd)?
Thanks