Will my receiver drive my N802's?

[Murunga]

Hello : )
I'm new here (and to HT) so thank you in advance for all your help.
I am purchasing a pair of 802's to use as my front mains in a 7.1 set up. Now I keep hearing (reading actually) that these guys need lots of quality power to sound as they should. So my question is, will my Denon AVR 5803 be enough?
If not, do I add an amp or a preamp? I know nothing about preamps or amps but will research in another thread if needed.

Thank you.
Murunga
Oh, my room is 15' wide, 39' long with a catherdal ceiling if that makes a difference.

[sugarmedia]

Yes, you're going to need some good power to give you better sound. Check out "Musical Fidelity"...they have a new, A5 series out with lots of quality power that also works with HT.

I have had no luck with Rotel being able to power high end speakers effectively. Perhaps that's because Rotel is considered the entry level to high-end.

[DeepEndX]

802's are power hungry speakers. If you want to use it to it's full potential (since 802's are awesome speakers with 500 watts), I would suggest you use Rotel 1090 if you are on a budget or a Classe or Mark Levinson type of level of amp if your not. With the proper wattage and high quality amp on the 802's, it would make a huge difference in the bass, clarity, and layering in your music. The amp would bring the level of sound from your 802's to a different level.

[perato]

I suspect that the Denon AVR-5803 would work fine, unless you have an acoustically dead room or like loud volume. Check out Audioholics review of the 5803. On page 5 of the review, Audioholics states that the 5803 was able to drive RBH speakers without any problem. RBH speakers are rated to 4 ohms and have sensitivities 88 db to 92 db. The review is from Sept. 2003 back when the reviewer had different speakers than he has now. If you have questions about the 5803, you should post on Audioholics fourums. You will likely get a response within a few days.

[DanR]

I would do yourself a favor and get some quality amplification for the 802's. Denon makes a fine integrated HT receiver, but really isn't in the same league as the 802's. Would you put Firestone's on a Ferarri??? And you don't really need to go haywire with ultra-high wattage amps. Just get a high quality amp. The purity of the watt is paramount as well as the current capability.

[jteoh1]

I have Denon 5803 connected to N802s front speakers in the bi-amp setup. I connected 5803's Zone2 speaker output jacks to the low frequency inputs of the N802s and the 5803's main speaker output jacks to N802 mid/high frequency inputs.

In my opinion, the performance is quite good in my side-by-side amp shoot-out evaluation tests of my 5803 "amp" against Sunfire Signature 600W, Bryston 4B SST (300W/channel) and Rotel RB-1090 amps. The bass response of the bi-amp'd 5803 delivers good bass slam with much fuller and richer sound overall.

Before the bi-amp setup, the bass response was a bit hollow. The 5803 lacked the power to effectively drive the bass drivers at low volume. With the bi-amp setup, you have the ability to set the Zone2 volume to "pump up" the current delivered to N802s bass drivers.

I would consider this bi-amp the passive setup. The Zone2 is delivering full range audio signal to N802s' lower frequency inputs and let the N802 crossover filter out the mid and high frequency. This is not the ideal setup, it tends to sound a tiny bit "noisy" for the bass drivers and lower frequency sound reproduction is not as clean.

In my opinion, the 5803 is a top notch high-end receiver. While it sounds good, I suspect it still does not bring out the full potential of the N802s. It is a stop gap measure for me until I find the right separate pre/pro and amp for the N802s. Good separates are not cheap and finding the right amp for N802s take a lot of auditioning and home evaluations.

Note that in this bi-amp setup, you can only get 5.1 setup out of 5803 as you have to forgo the surround back outputs for Zone 2 power amp assignment. I wired my formerly SBL and SBR to Surround B channels. Not ideal for channel output calibration as my Surround A and Surround B speakers are different in size. So, you do get a bit uneven channel output between them.

Again, you got to make a judgment for yourself what is good enough. You may be very impressed with this setup and potentially save thousands instead of buying separates.

Good luck.

John