<font color='#000000'>Hi, From your selections, I'm guessing that you're in the UK or Europe. I googled the Kandy (the MIII seems to be the current version) and it looks like a decent stereo integrated amp. You didn't mention either your listening interests nor your financial situation. Your heading indicates that this will be your first audio system.
Why are you looking at a stereo only system? Is your only interest in critical listening to classical and jazz? What sort of upgradablity do you want? Are you never going to be interested in home theater, or DvD audio as it matures? Is this a lot of money for you or will it be relatively easy to scrap this and get something else should your needs change?
How good is your ear? Have you listened to a lot of the types of music you like live to have a standard of comparison? I've always said, don't pay for differences you can't hear.
What sort of room is this system going into? Have you been educating yourself on room acoustics? Don't forget, especially when you're critically listening, what you're actually hearing is the synergy between the speakers and the room- a hundred bucks spent on intellegently improving the room acoustics can have as big (or bigger) impact as putting another thousand into better speakers.
By the way- higher end speakers tend to be sold by higher end stores that know how to set them up and thus show better in the store. There are less expensive speakers that could do a very decent job that you can't get a good impression of in the store as they're running them from a mid-fi receiver through a big switching system in a room that hasn't been very well acousticly set up. So if you compare them to speakers directly connected to twenty thousand bucks worth of separates in a room put together by a store that does custom installations, you can't really make a good decision. I had that experience comparing CSW Towers in their low end showroom, and then driving to a high end audio store and listening to the same material on Paradigm Reference Studio 80's through the aforementioned separates in a really great room. It was no surprise that the Paradigms sounded more open and smoother in the mid-high ranges, but the interesting thing was they weren't hugely better, indicating that the Towers might be a very good value if properly set up. Six years later, I got them, and am amazed at the musicality of them.. even when I haven't upgrading my amplifier yet.</font>
