Realistically £32k for a complete system should get you on the High end sound nursery slopes.
Source. Amp. Speakers. Cables and support.
Some enjoy more the journey than the destination - to which £32k would be a mere fraction of cost.
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My Naim Muso gives plenty of pleasure and can be had for a few hundred pounds on the used market. It has that Naim sound that I love and is unobtrusive physically.
I have a main system and an Atom HE / active speakers system both obvious better than the muso but all three give me a great listening experience.
Based on my experience the room you play your system in has a big impact on sound so buying a 200mile an hour sports car to drive around the Isle of Wight analogy is definitely true…
It’s also surprising how quickly you normalise an upgrade, pesky hobby can eat cash at quite a rate if you are not careful!
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I auditioned this when I wanted a 2nd system for the bedroom.
I found it a bit bass light so am now looking elsewhere…….
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The title of this thread could easily be “Good car. How Much Do I Need To Spend?”.
Nobody blinks at spending £40k on a new car or £12k on a used one. It’s all the same to me. 
I understand now those who complain on living in castles with 300 m2 bedrooms.
They have to buy 2 towers of subwoofers, not WAF friendly. Life is hard sometimes.
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In my experience, it really depends on how much you think is affordable.
Starting with the musical experience, I find that on a lesser system that is still very good, such as my UQ2, I might struggle with a new bit of music and give up. But if I listen to it on the “big rig” Naim system I am able to crack it and “get it” after which I can enjoy it on my smaller desktop system.
So for me, the threshold for how good is good enough really starts with at which level of performance can I properly comprehend a piece of music without needing help from a better system first.
While, for me, that is ging to be more than the cost of a UQ2 and bookshelf speakers I have found that it is certainly a leverl far lower cost than my big Naim system.
Several years back I set myself a task of building one full system source to speakers for the same cost as one Naim black box. The then Supercap DR 2020 ex VAT retail price was my limit. I built that system; one pair of speakers, one amp, one DAC, one streaming transport, good speaker cables and interconnect. Came in under budget and to this day, it blows me away. There are a few things it does better than the Naim system even. But importantly, it was good enough to be my final system. It met that requirement of being able to crack open any piece of music.
A few years later I built another system for half the price of a Supercap DR for another room. That was a combined streaming preamp, power amp, and speakers. Really good for the money. Significantly more than a UQ2 and less than the arbitrary Supercap DR price limit, but this system does not meet that all important criteria. Unfamiliar music is, like the UQ2, a bit of a challenge at times.
Short answer: The cost of one Naim Classic series black box is how much I need to spend. Everything beyond that is a pleasant bonus but in no way necessary.
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Good job the analogy wasn’t Isle of Man - although we don’t have motorways, most roads single carriageway with single lane each way, many of them have no speed limit and uf capable of doing so safely you can legally do 200mph!
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At 10 000 euro 
In love this forum!
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You only have to look at the “What car are you driving“ thread to realise that many members are a either very wealthy (certainly an order of magnitude more than me) or possibly living wildly beyond their means.
So the OP’s observation seems accurate in relation to what many members use. Absurd though it may seem, is quite understandible.
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£30k should get you a decent hifi. Pairingis the key.. you can spend £100k but the sound may sucks. Pairing .. it’s all about pairing , and sometimes it takes some luck doing so …
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In my previous post I’ve been focusing mainly on the enjoyment and the essence of music, but your thoughts are interesting. That’s another very important thing to consider without a doubt.
I have seen articles in Hi Fi mags, where people have spent €10,000 just on a few bits of wire that connect the amp to the speakers.
Sometimes it might be the opposite. I bought had the latest Bill Frisell album, that somehow I could not get into. I forgot about it, but when I played a MP3 rip in the car, it suddenly clicked with me. Sometimes it is my €500 Shure 1540 headphones rather than my reference grade Sennheiser HD800S, that reveals the goodness of a record.
Yeah I know, was just making a joke about the Pauper-Fi usage in combination with an amount that is more than the annual income of two thirds of the world.
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I wouldn’t/couldn’t have bought my current end-game speakers new. But used in perfect condition and ~half price made it possible.
Or just have one system? 
Depends. If you have several rooms you spent a lot of time in, one system can be pretty lonely.
Someone once said if I didn’t have my other separates systems and just the one main system I could build an even better one. I did the math. It wasn’t true.
Considering my most expensive second system is the equivalent of one box out of the 7 that make up the Naim system (counting speakers as a box) and the next system is half the cost of that, and the desktop system half as much again, if I add all those together, that still doesn’t even get me to close to the next model up of the source, preamp, or power amp let alone a better fully balanced system.
So really multiple systems haven’t diluted the main one at all.
I was just teasing ….
Depends on too many variables. I have recently spent a few days in an empty flat re decorating.
This was my kit, modern electronics gave me a useful uplift over the phone alone
more than adequate sound quality, bass, separation and clarity.
I came home and daren’t add up the cost of my various room systems to get the same adequateness. 
That’s all I have ever had, with quite a few upgrades over the decades part funded by selling previous kit, otherwise I could have accumulated spares to kit out another room.
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