I've assembled this very musical sounding system after about 15 years of a serious high end audio addiction and a lifetime addiction to music listening.

My audio priorities are as follows:

1) The music always comes first, and as you can see from the photos of my records and CDs, I really mean it.

2) System setup and placement within the listening room is very important. A properly setup system and carefully chosen listening position will do more to improve playback than most tweaks.

3) Balance is key. By this I mean that one should pay attention to balancing the quality of the components within the system so that no one piece is either much better or worse than any of the others. And one should also balance the overall system to the listening room, i.e. small room = small system, etc.

4) Finally, no equipment or change to one's system can be judged worth a damn in a quick AB test. Most differences take several weeks of listening to be fully understood.

My listening room is approximately 13 feet wide by 20 feet long with the speakers facing the long dimension. The speakers are 6 feet apart and about 4 feet from both the side and rear walls. The subwoofer is located almost in a corner, behind the right speaker. The main listening position is 8 feet from the speakers. There is no rear wall as the room is open to the rest of the living space.

My listening tastes and music collection are about 55% jazz, 35% rock and 10% classical with most new purchases being jazz. Within jazz, I enjoy most styles except for "smooth" and really enjoy the outside or "free" stuff, hence the system's name.

Hearing a well recorded, really cooking and free blowing outside jazz recording played back on fine sounding audio system is truly a thing of beauty.