Fundamentally if you are not presenting high quality to your (hugely expensive) speakers they may sound ‘impressive’ but the musicality, the engagement, the connection, the details and the emotion won’t be there. The limitations may be more evident too.
In my view you should build a balanced system, and above all surely try to assemble a system at the sort of expense you are considering with careful auditioning at home, using existing components, and the support of a dealer.
I don’t know where you are, but here in the UK it is a buyers market at present (due to the state of our economy) & speakers at the level you are considering are not flying off the shelves.
Even at the price you have been offered I doubt your dealer is exactly giving them away. I therefore suggest that it’s you that is in the stronger bargining position. Therefore, if they want the sale tell them that you will not proceed unless, as a minimum, they let you bring in your amp/speakers in to hear against/with the Focal’s. If the dealer refuses, walk away.
If I were considering spending the amount you are, if I wanted a dealer demo at 3.00am on a Sunday morning I would expect to get one!
Ignore my advice if your surname is Musk/Bezos/Gates etc. & just go for it instead…
I agree balance is certainly ideal, and should be the target (though different people may have different ideas as to what constitutes balance - it is certainly not directly cost related!). But the reality with system upgrades is that unless every upgrade is a completely new system, balance inevitably may be several steps away - it is then just a matter of how big one’s steps are, and how far apart, and in what order should components be improved. My belief, based on experience, is that once a system is half decent if is best to put speakers first.
If I were spending this amount I would expect to be requiring some conditions prior to purchase.
If dealer wouldn’t agree to them I would walk away. In this instance (certainly for a UK purchase at present), the prospective purchaser is definitely in the driving seat.
Ah just saw this. The 500 is already held back by the source and pre… will these be upgraded to match the 500 and new speakers? Otherwise the source and pre will be very exposed as the weak links in the system.
Thanks to all for the suggestions. I know my system is unbalanced. I’m going to decide wether to invest first in upgrading to 552 and then the speakers or viceversa.
I was oriented to Focal Utopia Scaka, then I found the opportunity of this Stella at 40k.
I’m going to listen to them then to listen to 500+Scala in a dealer and then decide
I think that’s a great approach, especially as you plan to improve the streamer and pre. The order then is not so important if good second hand options present themselves. Happy listening and good luck.
About 10 hours’ driving, 12 hours each way if you take a sensible breaks. Trivial in the context of spending the sort of money those speakers cost. Last time I auditioned speakers I drove a similar distance but also had two ferry journeys averaging 3 hours each, and a hotel stay, to visit 3 places and audition 5 speakers, taking with me my own large and heavy (>60kg each) speakers plus amp and source.
Necessity nothing more, so admiration not needed! Spending what for me was a very large amount for a hifi purchase I needed to be sure it was the right choice. Our ears are not perfect reference devices, and without something to reference or calibrate our ears it is all too easy to be impressed at a demo, no matter how thoroughly you listen. Had I lived near a dealer having what I wanted to hear and offering home demos I wouldn’t have needed to take on that expedition, though I quite enjoyed it. By the way, the first, and furthest, place was a private seller, who, as a fellow enthusiast, was happy to welcome me into his home with my speakers.
Get the speakers now and upgrade the preamp at a later stage.
Personally I disagree with the balanced system concept. If you aim for it to be balanced then in theory there’s no room for incremental upgrades. If you upgrade one component at the time surely the rest of the system will be outmatched. My system was never balanced and probably never will be balanced but I’m okay with it and it’s much easier and cheaper to upgrade this way.
Understandably as this is a Naim forum a lot of people are fixated on electronics. I think I’ve seen on the forum £75-80k systems driving £7-10k speakers and Naim is now pairing scala utopia evo with Nova PE…