Hi Gonglee
Welcome to the forum.
Before I switched to kits, 2 months ago I always listened to very good brand gear, and to be honest very expensive. Thought kits were for students or hobbyist, had no idea they could better mainstream gear.
In High end , the pursue of musicality and the suggestion you are not listening anymore to electrical gear but to real people, in real performances, manufacturers do not aim anymore to the mainstream buying public, because
1) they are not really interested
2) it is much too expensive.
So my gear totalled from vinyl/cd player to speakers, incl amps and interconnects etc 30.000 US $ which is not very expensive in some high end circles. It also weights over 80 kilo's! NOT because I want to spend "a car" to my system, but because I needed the tranparancy combined with the musicality of the whole system in order to be "fooled" in perceiving real people singing in front of me.
I listened prior to buying to the top Marantz and Accuphases, did not even border to listen to Sony or Yamaha; but well known mainstream Japanese brands , just don't have it. Technically fine, but sounds HiFi like a perfect machine.
Out of curiosity I came across this forum and tried the AKSA 55 N+ for my Dolby Home theater.
What a surprise if you put the Aksa in a transparent system. And Now I am selling all my gear to start all over again. Not that the Aksa sounds that much better than my MELOS 400 triode amps (once a favourite of Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound) but because I made it myself, I can carry it with one hand and surprise surprise it let me hear more fine details, I never heard before on My Martin Logan's Quest, electrostatics
IS it better than Marantz? Any Marantz (don't know about vintage tubes gear, but then you have to heavily mod them). Better than McIntosh? Depends on which (much more expensive) McIntosh. In the right system McIntosh tubes can sound wonderful. You were not really talking about McIntosh solid state . did you : )
