Hi Pops...That's some nice gear you have there, but I'm a little bit thrown back by your statments. Your saying the Polks sound as good as the Vandy's just different??? Although the Vandy's have never been the speaker of my choice (a little bit on the warm side for me) I still think they sound pretty good. I certainly feel they do almost everything more right than the Polks could ever hope to. Vandy's strong suit has always been that they are very open sounding & have excellent imaging & soundstaging capabilties. Something the Polks could never come close to. Not to mention the Vandy's are more nuetral sounding than the Polks. You may want to try replacing your cables if your not hearing these differances. I've always found MIT to be some what veiled. My philosophy is to start with really good speakers (put your $'s there) than slowly put the right matching components in front of them to really get them to sing. To start with mid-fi speakers such as Polks & then put high resolution electronics in front them in my opinion seems a waste. Reason being...simply because those speakers will never allow you to realize the full benifits of high resolution electronics. Rob: your getting an awful lot of information here which can be confusing. Simple rule of thumb is as you may well know...the speakers will affect the sound of any system the most, than the source (CD player, Transport/DAC or phono), preamp, amp, speakers wires, interconnects, lastly power cords. In that order. One other component which would make more sonic improvement than any of the wires is the PS Audio power plant as mention in one of these threads.