Same speakers/amp for surround & music listening?
Discussion
For my surround in the living room I have a mid-range Yamaha AV amp with B&W 601 S2's left over from my original stereo set-up at the front and Mordaunt Short Avants as centre, rears and sub.
For music listening I have routed my Roksan Kandy CD player into the Yamaha amp (the Roksan amp relegated to the loft for now) on stereo only through the 602's.
I have it set up this way as I do not have space to have a separate AV amp and stereo amp and two sets of speakers. I guess though that the AV amp is not optimised for sereo sound and certainly doesn't sound as rich as the Roksan.
Do others combine their music/av kit, or keep them separate?
For music listening I have routed my Roksan Kandy CD player into the Yamaha amp (the Roksan amp relegated to the loft for now) on stereo only through the 602's.
I have it set up this way as I do not have space to have a separate AV amp and stereo amp and two sets of speakers. I guess though that the AV amp is not optimised for sereo sound and certainly doesn't sound as rich as the Roksan.
Do others combine their music/av kit, or keep them separate?
I'm trying to solve this conundrum myself. I have just sold a NAD C350 stereo amp that performed much better than my AV amp for stereo duties, but having two setups was just too complicated for the family to use (it's bad enough having a separate box for BluRay, DVD and CD players without having two amps to contend with 
).
My Denon AVR2808 doesn't sound a patch on the NAD C350 even fed with the same CD player (and cables, if you worry about such things). The nearest I've got is using the left and right inputs on the external 7.1 input section (least processing involved, though I still think that there is analogue to digital back to analogue conversion occuring). I then feed this to an Arcam P90/3 power amp using the 2808's pre outs (driving the front three speakers as it's a 3 channel power amp). I have a set of PMC TB2+ speakers at the front. So it seems that the Arcam power amp helps to some degree (probably also for spreading the load when driving all 7 speakers for AV duties too), but also the 'preamp' section of the 2808 effects the sound, so choosing the input method with the least processing definately helps (external inputs still sounds better than using the 'regular' inputs and setting the amp to 'pure direct' in my case). My plan is to go over to using a processor at some point, hence picking up the P90/3 secondhand, but I'll need at least one other stereo power amp (with 12 volt trigger to make it all simple to use) for 5.1 or I can use a very old NAD 310 amp to turn on manually to power the rear surrounds for full 7.1 if I want to keep all the AV speakers in use for films.
I'm starting a new kitchen project so current AV plans are on hold for myself (unless a real bargain turns up secondhand, like an Arcam AV8 or AV9 processor for the right price). However, there are some interesting models recently launched that might be worth considering such as the new Arcam AVR500 or AVR600, also there is a new AV processor (requires a separate power amp of course) from an American company Emotiva for well under £1,000 that seems to be generating a bit of a buzz. The older Audiolab 8000AP is reported to sound very good for stereo music (but requires the player to decode HD format to LPCM as that's the only HD format it can accept), can be found secondhand for around £600 or less, but needs a power amp too as it's also a processor like the Emotiva.
However, finding an AV amp that sounds great in stereo for a reasonable price is a bit like that 'Holy Grail' car, you know; the one that does 0-60 in 4 seconds, looks fantastic, but does 50 mpg and no one else knows about it so they are a secondhand bargain. (I never found it either).
If you do find it...let me know.
).My Denon AVR2808 doesn't sound a patch on the NAD C350 even fed with the same CD player (and cables, if you worry about such things). The nearest I've got is using the left and right inputs on the external 7.1 input section (least processing involved, though I still think that there is analogue to digital back to analogue conversion occuring). I then feed this to an Arcam P90/3 power amp using the 2808's pre outs (driving the front three speakers as it's a 3 channel power amp). I have a set of PMC TB2+ speakers at the front. So it seems that the Arcam power amp helps to some degree (probably also for spreading the load when driving all 7 speakers for AV duties too), but also the 'preamp' section of the 2808 effects the sound, so choosing the input method with the least processing definately helps (external inputs still sounds better than using the 'regular' inputs and setting the amp to 'pure direct' in my case). My plan is to go over to using a processor at some point, hence picking up the P90/3 secondhand, but I'll need at least one other stereo power amp (with 12 volt trigger to make it all simple to use) for 5.1 or I can use a very old NAD 310 amp to turn on manually to power the rear surrounds for full 7.1 if I want to keep all the AV speakers in use for films.
I'm starting a new kitchen project so current AV plans are on hold for myself (unless a real bargain turns up secondhand, like an Arcam AV8 or AV9 processor for the right price). However, there are some interesting models recently launched that might be worth considering such as the new Arcam AVR500 or AVR600, also there is a new AV processor (requires a separate power amp of course) from an American company Emotiva for well under £1,000 that seems to be generating a bit of a buzz. The older Audiolab 8000AP is reported to sound very good for stereo music (but requires the player to decode HD format to LPCM as that's the only HD format it can accept), can be found secondhand for around £600 or less, but needs a power amp too as it's also a processor like the Emotiva.
However, finding an AV amp that sounds great in stereo for a reasonable price is a bit like that 'Holy Grail' car, you know; the one that does 0-60 in 4 seconds, looks fantastic, but does 50 mpg and no one else knows about it so they are a secondhand bargain. (I never found it either
).If you do find it...let me know.
Edited by OldSkoolRS on Monday 18th January 23:12
OldSkoolRS said:
I'm trying to solve this conundrum myself. I have just sold a NAD C350 stereo amp that performed much better than my AV amp for stereo duties, but having two setups was just too complicated for the family to use (it's bad enough having a separate box for BluRay, DVD and CD players without having two amps to contend with ).
My Denon AVR2808 doesn't sound a patch on the NAD C350 even fed with the same CD player (and cables, if you worry about such things). The nearest I've got is using the left and right inputs on the external 7.1 input section (least processing involved, though I still think that there is analogue to digital back to analogue conversion occuring). I then feed this to an Arcam P90/3 power amp using the 2808's pre outs (driving the front three speakers as it's a 3 channel power amp). I have a set of PMC TB2+ speakers at the front. So it seems that the Arcam power amp helps to some degree (probably also for spreading the load when driving all 7 speakers for AV duties too), but also the 'preamp' section of the 2808 effects the sound, so choosing the input method with the least processing definately helps (external inputs still sounds better than using the 'regular' inputs and setting the amp to 'pure direct' in my case). My plan is to go over to using a processor at some point, hence picking up the P90/3 secondhand, but I'll need at least one other stereo power amp (with 12 volt trigger to make it all simple to use) for 5.1 or I can use a very old NAD 310 amp to turn on manually to power the rear surrounds for full 7.1 if I want to keep all the AV speakers in use for films.
I'm starting a new kitchen project so current AV plans are on hold for myself (unless a real bargain turns up secondhand, like an Arcam AV8 or AV9 processor for the right price). However, there are some interesting models recently launched that might be worth considering such as the new Arcam AVR500 or AVR600, also there is a new AV processor (requires a separate power amp of course) from an American company Emotiva for well under £1,000 that seems to be generating a bit of a buzz. The older Audiolab 8000AP is reported to sound very good for stereo music (but requires the player to decode HD format to LPCM as that's the only HD format it can accept), can be found secondhand for around £600 or less, but needs a power amp too as it's also a processor like the Emotiva.
However, finding an AV amp that sounds great in stereo for a reasonable price is a bit like that 'Holy Grail' car, you know; the one that does 0-60 in 4 seconds, looks fantastic, but does 50 mpg and no one else knows about it so they are a secondhand bargain. (I never found it either).
If you do find it...let me know.
Jesus mate, that was complicated! You must have a hell of a lot of wires behind your telly! ).My Denon AVR2808 doesn't sound a patch on the NAD C350 even fed with the same CD player (and cables, if you worry about such things). The nearest I've got is using the left and right inputs on the external 7.1 input section (least processing involved, though I still think that there is analogue to digital back to analogue conversion occuring). I then feed this to an Arcam P90/3 power amp using the 2808's pre outs (driving the front three speakers as it's a 3 channel power amp). I have a set of PMC TB2+ speakers at the front. So it seems that the Arcam power amp helps to some degree (probably also for spreading the load when driving all 7 speakers for AV duties too), but also the 'preamp' section of the 2808 effects the sound, so choosing the input method with the least processing definately helps (external inputs still sounds better than using the 'regular' inputs and setting the amp to 'pure direct' in my case). My plan is to go over to using a processor at some point, hence picking up the P90/3 secondhand, but I'll need at least one other stereo power amp (with 12 volt trigger to make it all simple to use) for 5.1 or I can use a very old NAD 310 amp to turn on manually to power the rear surrounds for full 7.1 if I want to keep all the AV speakers in use for films.
I'm starting a new kitchen project so current AV plans are on hold for myself (unless a real bargain turns up secondhand, like an Arcam AV8 or AV9 processor for the right price). However, there are some interesting models recently launched that might be worth considering such as the new Arcam AVR500 or AVR600, also there is a new AV processor (requires a separate power amp of course) from an American company Emotiva for well under £1,000 that seems to be generating a bit of a buzz. The older Audiolab 8000AP is reported to sound very good for stereo music (but requires the player to decode HD format to LPCM as that's the only HD format it can accept), can be found secondhand for around £600 or less, but needs a power amp too as it's also a processor like the Emotiva.
However, finding an AV amp that sounds great in stereo for a reasonable price is a bit like that 'Holy Grail' car, you know; the one that does 0-60 in 4 seconds, looks fantastic, but does 50 mpg and no one else knows about it so they are a secondhand bargain. (I never found it either
).If you do find it...let me know.
Edited by OldSkoolRS on Monday 18th January 23:12
I have a Marantz AV receiver hooked up to Mordaunt Short Pearls front and back and, for me, it sounds great playing MP3 (higher bitrate) or FLAC files via the HTPC. I would love to experience a true high end set up so I can appreciate what I'm missing. It's hard to realise, and then justify the expense, of how much better things could be unless you hear it first hand.
We're about to put our house up for sale and I'm thinking of some upgrades in the new house. Detached, as loud as I feckin want!
I gave thought to this too. My solutioin was as follows:
For DVD and BluRay:
Marantz DV7001 CD/DVD/SACD or PS3 outputting to a Yamaha RXV640 AV receiver via optical. The Yamaha drives surrounds and center with the front pair driven by my Hi-Fi stereo amp connected to the AV amp pre out.
For CD:
The same Marantz DV7001 CD/DVD/SACD player outputting to my Hi-Fi stereo amp via analogue interconnect.
I don't listen to CD's often now as have a Squeezebox Duet for those duties, which is plugged directly to my Hi-Fi amp, same as above.
FWIW my Hi-Fi stereo amp is a Cyrus7 + PSX-R and my speakers are all matching NEAT Petite Mk3 with a REL Quake subwoofer for LFE with movies.
I think you could keep your B&W fronts, but keep your Roksan stereo amp to power them. If your Roksan has a spare input (called AV hopefully) connect this to the FL and FR pre out from your Yamaha and you have the optimum set up for your existing kit with the added extra of only one set of speakers.
For DVD and BluRay:
Marantz DV7001 CD/DVD/SACD or PS3 outputting to a Yamaha RXV640 AV receiver via optical. The Yamaha drives surrounds and center with the front pair driven by my Hi-Fi stereo amp connected to the AV amp pre out.
For CD:
The same Marantz DV7001 CD/DVD/SACD player outputting to my Hi-Fi stereo amp via analogue interconnect.
I don't listen to CD's often now as have a Squeezebox Duet for those duties, which is plugged directly to my Hi-Fi amp, same as above.
FWIW my Hi-Fi stereo amp is a Cyrus7 + PSX-R and my speakers are all matching NEAT Petite Mk3 with a REL Quake subwoofer for LFE with movies.
I think you could keep your B&W fronts, but keep your Roksan stereo amp to power them. If your Roksan has a spare input (called AV hopefully) connect this to the FL and FR pre out from your Yamaha and you have the optimum set up for your existing kit with the added extra of only one set of speakers.
Edited by allgonepetetong on Tuesday 19th January 14:48
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