I haven't done direct A/B comparisions in my listening room. But, my guess is that at least some of the affordable multichannel amps from Yamaha, Marantz, Denon and others are competitive with the audiophile offerings of smaller manufacturers. Particularly with speakers that are easy to drive, which is the current trend in speaker design. After all, do people really believe that a Jaguar outperforms a Honda, or that a Rolex outperforms a Timex?
All Amps Sound the Same....
A guy posted this on another forum:
"This is my other expensive hobby and while I agree with you about low end receivers, once you get to mid-priced (~$600-1000 street price) multichannel receivers you're into pretty good gear...Keep in mind that an amplifier sounds like an amplifier and changing brands should add or subtract nothing to/from the sound and that going up the food chain just adds power output or snob appeal to a separate amplifier...These days most audiophiles either use a good quality multichannel receiver alone or use a mid-priced multichannel receiver to drive their amps even for 2-channel."
Wow, where do they come up with this? Lack of experience?
"This is my other expensive hobby and while I agree with you about low end receivers, once you get to mid-priced (~$600-1000 street price) multichannel receivers you're into pretty good gear...Keep in mind that an amplifier sounds like an amplifier and changing brands should add or subtract nothing to/from the sound and that going up the food chain just adds power output or snob appeal to a separate amplifier...These days most audiophiles either use a good quality multichannel receiver alone or use a mid-priced multichannel receiver to drive their amps even for 2-channel."
Wow, where do they come up with this? Lack of experience?