Amp and preamp choice for B&W 704s, HTM7 center, DS7 rear, ASW850 sub

[Cacophonix1984]

Hello,

I think I am doing disservice to my speakers with a Yamaha RXV-2300 receiver for home theater and music.

I have a Mac mini and an Arcam Rdac for digital audio and video, and a decent Denon DVD player.

I would like to move to a decent amp preamp combo - budget about 5000 dollars.

I am also constrained by the fact that I move a lot and may need gear with a universal power supply.

Any suggestions welcome.

[pdmonty]

Electronics for your setup

Hello,

I think I am doing disservice to my speakers with a Yamaha RXV-2300 receiver for home theater and music.

I have a Mac mini and an Arcam Rdac for digital audio and video, and a decent Denon DVD player.

I would like to move to a decent amp preamp combo - budget about 5000 dollars.

I am also constrained by the fact that I move a lot and may need gear with a universal power supply.

Any suggestions welcome.

Honestly, I have almost your identical setup except I have 703's with an HTM2 center and if you look at my equipment list you'll see you don't have to break the bank to make these speakers sound amazing. I am using two second hand Marantz MM9000 5 channel THX certified amps (retailed for $1200 each) which I am using to Bi-amp all of my speakers (This equates to 150 watts to the top and 150 watts to the bottom of each channel in my 5.1 setup). These amps cost me approximately $400 each one off of Audiogon and the other from ebay. Marantz has very musical and slightly warm sounding gear and it was the perfect fit to tame the rather forward sounding tweeters on my mains and center. I recently upgraded to a Marantz AV8801 for $900 (retailed for 3K) pre/pro and honestly I'll never look back. I know most other members on here will tell you to go Krell, or Classe and these are great products....but at a high financial cost even on the used market. And while they do sound beautiful with B&W speakers, I'm not sure the cost to performance upgrade is justified unless of course we are talking about driving the upper end Nautilus line. Just my two cents but with the money saved going my route, you could afford some nice room treatments that can and usually does net you much better return on investment with regards to better sound.....cheers

[Mark_89]

Very interesting question. I myself have the following setup: 703s as mains, HTM7 center with 705s as rears. Coupled with a BK XXLS400 sub. I use a used Rotel 1095 power amp (€1250,-) together with a Marantz AV7702 (€1300,-). Very very content with this setup. According to the reviews the 7702 sounds even better than the 8801 for not an enormous amount more. Love this setup. Only gripe I have is that the Rotel has some relais issues. I have had to replace the main relais and probably will eventually need to replace the channel relais; but other than that this 200 w/channel beast sounds amazing.