For classical music lovers best amp for large orchestral forces?

@roxy1927 

hi there. I hear you loud and clear. For my profession I get to sit in a front violin chair in a great symphony orchestra. I listen to all music, jazz, rock, chamber music and also orchestral. There is no denying orchestral music reveals where ones system is at. It tells the story. I only in the last 2 years got into this because during covid I wasn’t performing. I was introduced to one of the worlds great stereo set up people and he has helped me build what is turning out to be a great system. I recently purchased a store demo VTL S-400 ii. It is a fabulous amp. Beyond fabulous, makes my integrated Luxman 590 II sound like a noisy plastic toy. For real. I will be making a major upgrade eventually from my modified AR pre, to CH precision. A great/quiet  pre is so important for classical. For orchestral you just want an amp that gets out of its own way but has a proper decay harmonically. The VtL i bought has that in spades. Reason is I have learned and spoken to Bea Lamm who is the ears behind VTL. She loves classical and we had an interesting conversation. No doubt Pass has some homogenization in the sound. Not sure 8k will take you where you want to go with orchestral. It certainly did not for me. I have also found through much trial that the quieter the system is the more orchestral loves it. For me starting with basic cables (just to hear the transformation) and introducing better and better cables one at a time to see if that was indeed useful has also helped classical in a huge way. in that regard I have heard such a huge transition from so much noise in a system to what my wife and I are finally calling a quiet system. We also found the streamer to be a major issue from a roon nucleus plus with nordost linear power supply (which wasn’t cheap) to a tremendous Wadax server. That also helped clean out and separate voices in orchestral as well. Sorry for the long post.

@roxy1927 

yes i love that you want to hear the musical experience that is orchestral playing. Great ears in an orchestra is always being deferential to what voices need to emerge. It isn’t always by any stretch the conductor that brings this out. It is more frequently the musicians that are sensitive. The only system I have heard that totally brought that to me as what I experience on a daily basis is CH precision. Especially the L1 pre amp. Dennis Davis misrepresented me in his review as what I heard in his room is what I heard on stage.  What it did was show the handoffs in the winds, the inner voices of the strings vs, just the 1st violin melodie etc. one should never hear an out of balance orchestra. Never to much timp or brass or 1sts melodie. It all has to work in synchronicity. So hard to get through a system. For example Concertgebouw hall or Szell hall in Cleveland or Berlin hall which are different or Suntory hall in Japan. These are tremendous halls all eclipsing Carnegie hall in my opinion. Balance is the key in orchestral. Never any voice dominating. In my opinion if bass is heavy or timp or organ etc, than it is improperly set up and not accurate. For example i auditioned the s-200 it is totally and completely nothing like the S-400 series 2. Totally different animal. Nothing similar there. Thanks again for letting me chat.