Looking for first system advice

Buy the best CD player that you can justify. It will establish what the rest of your system has to work with. Buy from stable, highly regarded manufacturers. For tube equipment, Jolida will be hard to beat. You can get an integrated amp, tube CD player, floor standing speakers, appropriate cabling, and an AC power screen for less than $3k. Also, consider a Sound Organisation stand for 250.00. Proper set up is essential to getting the best sound for the money. For solid state gear, consider Arcam electronics. For speakers, consider Focal / J.M. Lab. An example line up could be: (1) Jolida tube CD player @ 900.00, (1) Jolida integrated amplifier @ 750.00, (1) pair of floorstanding J.M. Lab speakers @ 850.00, (1) pair of Nordost speaker and interconnect cables @ 250.00 and (1) Audio Power Industries "Pack II" AC power screen @ 250.00. These are list prices. If you find these on Audiogon, you will pay alot less.

So are you throughly confused yet? There's a bagillion ways you can go here. And I seriously doubt you're goign to take anyone's blanket advise and run with it!
My suggestionis to find a pair of speakers you find you like the sound of, with the music and volume you like, and buy those, used or new(better deals on used, by far). Then, add amp, pre and source, as well as IC's, wire and Conditioner/tweaks, whatever. You might consider something that's driveable by integrated.
The guy above is pretty right regarding the Logan and SFaber speakers needing big amps mostly. You might try high end models that are good with tube integrateds, or ss integrateds, and start from there.

Here is another possibility:

--Magnepan 1.6,about $1200 used,including shipping
--16g heater cord for speaker wire from the hardware store
--Adcom 200 watt amp,either a 555 or a 5500, about $500,used.
--Bottlehead "Whole Deal" preamp,300 dollars and four or five hours of labor.
--Nad 521 rebook cd player as a transport,200,used
--Scott Nixon dac,about 250 dollars.
--enough acoustic fabric wallpaper to paper the wall behind the Maggies, 100 dollars plus install.

Let me amend my previous advice. Don't pay 250 for the Scott Nixon dac if you get a Bottlehead preamp. Instead,go to Nixon's web page and just get the circuit board and wire it into the preamp circuit ahead of the selector switch. Sorry about the oversight.

I absolutely agree with Brooks. It is much less expensive to buy good quality low powered amps than to buy good quality hi-powered amps. Of course, that means the speakers must be fairly efficient.

I like some of the speakers that Brooks mentioned and I would also suggest the Athena 3-driver floorstander (can't remember the model no.) that is currently available from AudioAdvisor for $349 shipped!! It is 92-93 db efficient and could probably live with an amp of only 5-30 watts.

I personally own the Reference 3a MM Decapo speakers that Brooks mentioned. I power them with a 3.5 watt/channel 2A3 based tube amp and get plenty of volume.

You might be shocked at the sound quality that can be achieved with a simple (Integrated amp, CD player, speakers) system based around a low powered amp and a pair of relatively efficient speakers.

My $.02 worth..................

Enjoy,

TIC