Hi all... I want to thank you all for your insightful feedback. Let me tell you why I’m looking to go "old School" (that is, Class A/B)... I’m 65 years old, and after approximately 50 years of listening to music way too loud, my ears are not what they used to be... They’re certainly not "Golden Ears" any more... So, an AVR will satisfy me just as much as separates at this point. Also, the main reason I want Class A/B instead of Class D is that I want an analog amplifier, rather than a digital amplifier... I was listening to some high end Marantz AVR’s in an audio store, and the owner told me that one was Class A/B and the other was Class D (I take him at his word)... I actually thought the Class D sounded a little cleaner and more detailed... but then I started researching customer reviews of those AVR, and I was surprised to fin that there are TONS of technical problems, and outright failures, of the Class D amps... Truthfully, I’m not shocked to read that. I’ve been in IT for almost 40 years, and I know how hard it is to program something new and innovative... it can take years to perfect the code and work out the bugs... Hence, my desire for an old fashioned analog amp... The only issue I find is the question of HDMI connections... it seems the best Class A/B AVR’s are from about 10 years ago, when HDMI was not yet a feature... I currently have a Rotel AVR (100 Watts per channel) that does not have HDMI, and I thought I wanted to upgrade to a more modern AVR... but I find myself looking at older AVR’s like the McIntosh MHT100 or MHT200, or some of the older Lexicon models, like t he RV-5 and the RV-8... I’ve lived without HDMI for this long, maybe I can live without it forever... Anyway, Thanks again to all who took the time to reply.
