By way of an update as well as acknowledgement of the thoughtful feedback:
With nearly 40 years of marriage under our belts, my lovely wife will readily admit that while she loves to listen to music, she is vastly less interested than am I in the particular means of delivery of said music. So the agreement we have struck as we prepare for retirement is for me to take the necessary steps to "get this out of my system" and yet stay within a particular budget we have set for this, or, to put it another way, go buy your darn speakers and amps, but don't come back looking for more stuff!
I’m good with this too, for surprisingly similar reasons; I want to be able to listen to music, using a good enough system so that I don’t have to dwell too much on further upgrades to the nature of the system past this set-up phase, or to put it another way, I want the system to be good enough to get out of the way of my desire to enjoy listening to music.
I can see the wry smiles out there; “bless his heart” as we say in the south, he's gonna be buying new stuff within months, but hey, one can dream!
So here’s where I’m at now:
Speakers, set; Maggie 1.7i--being ordered
Power Amp, set; Vidar stereo, will order when ready
Pre-amp, set, Freya + -- will order when ready
DAC, now set, Yggy GS, will order soon
Interconnects, Blue Jeans, but I have a lot of what I need already (including some speaker cables from
Paladin79!)
Source, in hand; CD collection and CA transport
Rationale; I was headed for mono Vidars and I haven’t given up, but I think its reasonable to start out with one and get acquainted with the setup—once its all bedded in, I can work on selling the Bifrost, the proceeds of which I can put toward the second Vidar and by my calculations still stay under budget. I think the Yggy GS is a good compromise of budget and sets up a quality foundation for the long haul.
My initial research forays into the digital world of Roon cores and endpoints, Tidal and Qobuz, etc., pretty much demonstrated that it is a configuration quagmire that will quickly become a distraction from the core principle—enjoy the music! So I will take my time to rip my CDs and build the disc-based collection first while further exploring and having a little fun with trialing the different systems before making any commitments.