CA-401 with long speaker cables or CAM-350s with long XLR cables?

[tmt]

I'm still looking for an amp to power my soon to be mine Nautilus 802s, so I keep bombarding this forum with questions

I can buy a Classe CA-401 (2 months old) for $4600 or I can get 2 Classe CAM-350 new for $6000.
$1400 is a heafty price difference ($4600 is already stretching the budget) and sound-wise I seriously doubt if the difference will be audible between the mono blocks and the stereo amp. I know a lot of people say that the CAM-350s are better, but are they $1400 better?

BUT one of the advantages of having monoblocks is that you can put them next to your speakers. Then I'll have to use longer XLR calbes so I guess the money you save from not having to buy long speaker wires will have to be invested in XLR cables.

I have no idea yet about pricing of descent cables, that's the one thing I haven't started to investigate yet. However I don't want to buy thousands of dollars for cables anyway.

My room is 15 feet wide, so I was planning to buy about 18 feet of speaker cables if I go with the CA-401. Of course bi-wiring would double the cost of the speaker wires (again I think the difference between single wiring or bi-wiring would be minimal, but I have never tried it out...)

One plus for the CA-401: that's just such a sweet looking amp, the CAM-350s are, well, ugly in comparison. However monoblocks do look 'cool'

[Glen B]

Long interconnects are desirable over long speaker cables. Even if you go with the
2-channel amp over monoblocks, you can still benefit from using short speaker cables by placing the single amp between the speakers.

[tmt]

I just read in the manual of the CAM-350 that you cannot connect the cinch and XLR inputs simultaniously. This can be done on the CA-401, it has a switch to change from unbalanced to balanced input.
I need this to switch from stereo (balanced all the way with a seperate pre-amp, or maybe a high-end soundcard, dunno yet) to HT use (my trusty old Denon) so I cannot use the CAM-350.
Phew that's one problem out of the way...

And yes that CA-401 is going to sit in the middle of the room (next to the center speaker)
If I pay that much money for it I don't want to shove it into a corner.
It's just too damn pretty
The cable length I was talking about is just to be "on the safe side". There is nothing more annoying than finding out that cables are just too short when moving equipment around.

[Glen B]

I just read in the manual of the CAM-350 that you cannot connect the cinch and XLR inputs simultaneously. This can be done on the CA-401, it has a switch to change from unbalanced to balanced input.
I need this to switch from stereo (balanced all the way with a seperate pre-amp, or maybe a high-end soundcard, dunno yet) to HT use (my trusty old Denon) so I cannot use the CAM-350.

Instead of using the balanced/unbalanced switch of the CA-401 as an input selector each time you need to switch between balanced 2-channel and unbalanced HT sources, you could feed the unbalanced signal into a Classe preamp's tape monitor loop. When the preamp tape monitor button is in the ON position, the unbalanced signal will be sent to the amp. When the tape monitor button is in the OFF position, the equipment plugged into the circuit will be out of the loop.

[Lex]

long balanced, short speaker cables. See me if you need either.

thanks,
Doug
CAT